Municipal Airports: New York's 1937 Seaplane Poster
Against a flat red sky, two aircraft divide the poster between them. Above, a twin engine landplane banks away in cream and tan. Below, riding its own white wake on blue green water, a great four engine flying boat lifts off, portholes in a row, spray at its hull. The lettering underneath is pure civic pride: CITY OF NEW YORK MUNICIPAL AIRPORTS.
The poster is a silkscreen made in 1937 by the New York workshop of the WPA's Federal Art Project; the Library of Congress copy is stamped December 8, 1937 on the back. Read the small print and it becomes a document of a specific moment, when New York was racing to build itself an air age infrastructure and putting its name, and its mayor's, on the result.
From the Collection
1930s WPA Era Vintage NYC Airport Poster
The New York Federal Art Project's 1937 silkscreen for Floyd Bennett Field, North Beach, and the East River seaplane bases.
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The Fine Print
The poster names the whole system: “No. 1 Floyd Bennett Field. No. 2 North Beach. East River Seaplane Bases, Wall Street and 31st Street. F.H. LaGuardia, Mayor. John McKenzie, Commissioner of Docks.” Floyd Bennett Field, on Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn, had opened in 1931 as the city's first municipal airport, named for the pilot who flew Admiral Byrd over the North Pole. North Beach, in Queens, was still being built on the poster's date; it opened in October 1939 as New York Municipal Airport and was soon renamed for the mayor himself.
The seaplane bases were the glamorous part. In the 1930s the great flying boats, the Clippers, were the only aircraft that could cross oceans, and they needed water, not runways. New York gave them terminals on the East River at Wall Street and at 31st Street, so a traveler could step off a boat plane in Manhattan itself. The flying boat in the poster, with its hull, its sponsons and its row of round windows, is drawn from that brief, splendid era just before long range landplanes made it obsolete.
A Mayor and an Airport
No name on the poster mattered more than LaGuardia's. Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor from 1934, was determined that his city would not be an aviation backwater, and he had a famous grievance to prove it: in 1934, flying from Chicago on a ticket that read New York, he refused to get off the plane when it landed at Newark, insisting he had paid to go to New York. The plane flew him on to Floyd Bennett Field, the newspapers loved it, and the campaign for a great New York airport had its founding story.
The poster is that campaign in graphic form. Where a commercial airline poster sold a destination, this one sells a system and a city government: two airports, two seaplane bases, all of it municipal, all of it modern. The WPA artists gave the bureaucracy a red sky and a flying boat, and made administration look like adventure.
Silkscreen Modernism
The New York poster workshop was the flagship of the Federal Art Project's poster division, and it was there that silkscreen printing was developed into a true poster medium, cheap, fast and capable of the flat, unmodulated color fields this design depends on. Each color is a separate screen; the cream of the aircraft, the red of the sky, the blue green of the water are laid down as solid shapes, and the drawing is done by the edges between them.
It is worth noticing how little shading there is. The flying boat's hull is modeled with two tones and a white wake; the landplane is nearly a silhouette with windows. This was the international modernist poster language of the 1930s, the same simplification the great European railway and airline posters used, put to work here for a city Department of Docks. Government art was rarely this stylish, and almost never this confident.
Two Machines, Two Eras
The two aircraft reward a second look, because the poster has caught aviation exactly at its hinge. The landplane above, a twin engine transport of the new all metal generation, belonged to the future of speed and runways. The flying boat below, with its boat hull, its stabilizing floats and its four engines, belonged to the brief present of 1937, when the oceans were still crossed from the water and a city's waterfront was its airport. Within ten years the landplane's descendants had won entirely, and the great Clippers were scrap.
The poster does not know this, of course, and its innocence is its documentary charm. It shows both machines with equal civic pride, the system complete: wheels for the continent, hulls for the world. New York's Department of Docks, which ran the airports and the seaplane bases alike, understood the pair as one portfolio, and the WPA artists drew them as one composition, sea below and sky above, the city administering both.
Afterlife
The world the poster advertises lasted about a decade. The flying boats were withdrawn during the Second World War, the East River bases faded, Floyd Bennett Field became a naval air station, and North Beach, as LaGuardia Airport, outgrew its municipal sibling so completely that the poster now reads as a portrait of the system at its hopeful beginning.
The poster itself had a second career as a classic. It sits in the Library of Congress WPA Poster Collection, and in 2016 it was one of the ten designs the U.S. Postal Service chose for its booklet of stamps honoring WPA poster art, a 1937 piece of civic advertising promoted, at last, to an emblem of American design.
