![]() On a sparkling Sunday, the 15th of October, the mayor "with pardonable pride," he beamed dedicated his crown jewel before more than a quarter-million New Yorkers. When the fair opened, there was not yet an airport to serve it. Newark officials, meanwhile, lodged protests with civil aviation authorities, seeking to protect their investment in their field. Building tradesmen branded the WPA workers incompetent wastrels and insisted that the private sector could have brought the job in for half the cost. There were many obstacles to timely completion: For one thing, the price tag swiftly increased from $13 million to $40 million, and the airport was scathed by the cost-conscious as a colossal boondoggle. The mayor was determined to finish his pride-and-joy airport by the time the Fair opened April 30, 1939. More than 20,000 relief workers from the federal Works Progress Administration worked around the clock for two years. In August 1937, the city bought North Beach Airport from Curtiss-Wright for $1.3 million and immediately began to more than quintuple its 105 acres with 17 million cubic yards of landfill scooped up from Rikers Island's mountains of cinder, ash and refuse. LaGuardia decided he was personally going to fix that. But it certainly couldn't handle commercial airliners. North Beach Airport was 20 minutes from the city sport fliers used it regularly the Police Department's Aviation Unit was hangared there so was the Daily News' photo plane. By the end of the 1920s, the Curtiss-Wright Corp. North Beach had been developed in the 1880s by piano manufacturer William Steinway, and for some few years it had been a popular shore resort and amusement park.
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