The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.
The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.
Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.
Fern L. Nesson
In 1939, Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn was one of two New York City airports, the other being North Beach Airport in Corona, Queens. Today, Fort Bennett Field is part of the Gateways National Park while North Beach, now called Laguardia Airport, is greatly expanded and transformed.
The Guide describes Floyd Bennett Field as follows:
“Floyd Bennett Field covers a rectangular expanse of 387 acres surrounded by fens bordering Jamaica Bay. It was dedicated by Mayr Walker in 1931 and named for Floyd Bennett, the aviator who piloted Admiral Byrd across the North Pole in 1926.
Carefully planned to handle a large volume of traffic and built on reclaimed marshland […] Floyd Bennett Filed has not been a commercial success because of its distance from the heart of the city.”
New York City Guide (1939) p. 503.
Perhaps due to its failure as a commercial success, the airfield remains exactly as it was in 1931. Its terminal and eight hangars are wonderful examples of art deco industrial architecture at its best. Even in semi-ruined condition, they are beautiful.
For an out-of-the-way airport, Floyd Bennet has been the scene of a considerable amount of drama over the years.
The dedication itself was a lively affair. On June 26, 1930, while a crowd of 25,000 watched, a flotilla of 600 US Army Air Corps aircraft led by Charles Lindbergh circled high above the the airport. In the crowd was Admiral Byrd himself.
In the 1930s, Floyd Bennett Field was the scene of a great many path-breaking feats of aviation. The Guide lists quite a few:
“The field’s strategic location, its long runways and clear approaches have made it a frequent base for long distance flights. The first was the nonstop transatlantic trip of 5014 miles to Istanbul, Turkey in 1931 by Russell Boardman and John Polando. In 1933, Wiley Post began and ended here his sensational solo flight around the word in 7 days, 18 hours and and 49 1/2 minutes. In 1938, Howard Hughes, embarking from Floyd Bennett Field, circled the globe and reduced Post’s record to 3 days, 19 hours and 8 minutes […] The register of the airport, signed by all flyers as they arrive and leave, is a signal collection of names famous in American aviation history.”
New York City Guide p. 504.
One significant omission from the Guide’s list was Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic from Britain to North America. Markham took off from England in on September 16, 1936 bound for Floyd Bennett Field. No pilot had yet flown non-stop, westward from Europe to America. nor made the flight solo, though several had died trying. Markham hoped to claim both records. On September 16, she did. After a 20-hour flight, her plane’s fuel tank vents iced up and she crash-landed on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. On September 21, she flew to Floyd Bennett Field where she was greeted by a huge crowd and honored with a New York City ticker-tape parade.
Markham’s extraordinary courage and accomplishment are matched fully by her literary accomplishment in her compelling and beautiful memoir, West With the Night, written in 1942.
Drama at the airport was by no means confined to aviation. In 1936, the Works Progress Administration funded new construction at the airport and, the Federal Arts Project commissioned August Henkel and Eugene Chodorow to paint murals for the airport’s main terminal. Henkel and Chodorow completed four large murals on canvas with the theme “The History of Flight.” Several photos exist of them sketching the work in one of the airport hangars.
The final versions of the murals were finished on July 7, 1940 and hung in the mezzanine of the terminal building. There was an immediate uproar. One mural depicting famous aviators in particular gave offense. Some thought that Orville Wright resembled Lenin. (In fact, the portrait was of an Austrian parachutist, Franz Reichfelt. Others objected to the depiction of aviation workers with their fists raised. Still others claimed that some of the workers looked “foreign” and that one on the aviators resembled Stalin.
When the New York Times reported on the controversy the next day, the Administrator of the Federal Art Project in New York City, Lieutenant Colonel Brehan Somervell, ordered the murals taken down immediately and, defying a call for hearings on the matter, he ordered them to be brought to the FPA headquarters in Manhattan where they were ripped up and burned on July 8.* [Footnote: The history of this episode is well and completely recounted in an article by Gerald Monroe. It can be accessed online at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/aaa.16.3.1556863. The article contains the only photographs taken of the completed murals. There are only three; the 4th panel is lost completely to history.]
Floyd Bennett Field is now part of the Gateway National Park in Brooklyn, New York. It is evocative—a wonderful place to visit.
February, 2022
