AIRPORT CITIES: Gateways to the Jet Age

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THE first siren whoosh of the commercial jetliner not only changed man's notion of time and travel by shrinking the earth some 40%, but set off an earth-bound revolution that is transforming the whole façade and function of the jet age's gateway: the airport. Nations and cities are taking a searching second look at the airports that served the piston-plane age —and finding them wanting. The result is an immense worldwide building boom to adapt them to the new and challenging problems—for pilots, passengers and cities —of the 600 m.p.h. jet planes. In the U.S. new or better airports are blossoming in Seattle, Miami, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles—and dozens of other airports are also undergoing major face-liftings. New runways are being hacked out of the wilderness in Asia and South America, and the travel-worn airports of Paris, Amsterdam and Mexico City, familiar to thousands of U.S. tourists, will soon sport a trim, unfamiliar look.

Prototype: Idlewild. The most glittering airport showcase—and one of the first to be rebuilt—is New York International Airport at Idlewild, the gateway to the U.S. (an estimated 8,550,000 air travelers this year). Because Idlewild is one of the world's busiest airports (an average of 640 landings and takeoffs a day) and a technological primer of jet age forethought, it has become the prototype and laboratory for many of the world's changing airports. This week ten officials of Aeroflot, the Soviet civil airline, will poke through every nook and cranny of Idlewild on a restricted tour of U.S. airports, searching for ideas to take back home. Cologne is building an instrument-landing runway with narrow-gauge lighting patterned after Idlewild's. Frankfurt has jet-terminal improvements scheduled, but is waiting to see how Idlewild's new facilities work.

Built in 1942 on land reclaimed from Jamaica Bay and what was once a golf course, Idlewild has become a vast, gleaming concrete-and-glass tiara (see color} covering 4,900 acres and representing an investment of $330 million. Much more than merely a big new airport, it typifies a whole new jet age concept: a self-contained airport city, so complete that it has two dramatic societies and an animal-port where anything from parakeets (50¢ a day) to lions ($5 a day) can be boarded.

Underground Airport. For all its glitter, Idlewild will have plenty of competition before the airport boom abates. Many of the new airports boast functional rather than beautiful buildings, must first use their money for such expensive necessities as lengthening runways—at $1,000 a ft.—to meet the 10,500-ft. jet requirements. But some airports with money to spare are experimenting with concepts as dramatic in jet age design as Idlewild's.

Among them:

¶ Dulles International Airport, due to open near Washington, D.C. in 1961, is radically different in concept. Unlike most airports, it will have no passageways reaching out onto the apron to detract from its lofty, templelike terminal designed by Architect Eero Saarinen. Instead of jets coming up to terminal fingers, passengers will simply walk into giant "mobile lounges" that will move them out to the jets.