Episode 49 of the Bowry Boys, LaGuardia Airport, and the Golden Age of New York Aviation.

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Hello there, and welcome to the Bowry Boys.

My name is Greg. Tom is away this week.

While he's away, I'm going to shake it up here on the show and change the format around a little bit.

Today I'll be bringing you a very brief history.

You could say a supersonic jet through history of New York City Aviation from the birth of flight into the late 40s with a special focus on today's topic LaGuardia Airport.

The air above the city has been filled with aircrafts of all manner shapes and sizes as early as, believe it or not, 1909.

So today I'll tell you a little bit about the earliest airfields of the city.

So to keep it straight, we'll be talking about six different airports today, just two casually mentioned, the two biggest actually, Newark Airport, which is of course in New Jersey.

And JFK Airport, which we will go in depth a little bit here and then more on a later episode.

The forum focusing on, well, one was only a five minute ferry ride from downtown Manhattan.

The second one, which was in South Brooklyn, hosted the biggest and most glamorous names in aviation, back in the day when merely flying a plane bestowed you with celebrity status.

The third airfield that I'll be mentioning is today nothing more than basically a grassy field and a row of abandoned hangars and has actually been targeted as a potential cesspool for the West Nile virus.

And then of course finally we'll talk about the debut of LaGuardia Airport, the very active airport in Queens that was essentially created because of a temper tantrum and finally brought mainstream commercial flying to the New York area.

Believe it or not, it used to be considered one of the biggest and best airports in the world.

Almost all New Yorkers have stumbled through its crowded terminal at one time or another, but to get there of course, we've got to start the beginning.

And if you're talking about the birth of flight, well, maybe we've obviously got to go all the way back to Orville and Wilbur Wright.

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