Newark Airport: America's First Modern Airport

You are near one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure in the history of American aviation. Newark Liberty International Airport opened on October first, nineteen twenty-eight, built on sixty-eight acres of landfill reclaimed from the Passaic River marshes on the edge of Newark Bay. What opened that day was not just another airfield. It was the first airport in the United States with a paved concrete runway and purpose-built hangars, and within two years it added the nation's first dedicated air traffic control tower, part of the full constellation of features we now consider standard equipment at any major airport.

Within a year, Newark had become the busiest commercial airport in the world, a distinction it held until LaGuardia opened in New York in nineteen thirty-nine. The United States Post Office moved all its air mail operations here from Hadley Field, establishing Newark as the hub of the national airmail system. Airlines including Eastern, Transcontinental and Western Air, and United all ran operations out of the field.

The airport's history carries darker passages too. In nineteen fifty-one and nineteen fifty-two, a series of crashes on approach to Newark killed civilians on the ground in nearby Elizabeth, triggering public outcry that temporarily forced the airport to close. The crashes spurred serious federal investment in instrument approaches and air traffic control, safety advances whose descendants still govern aviation today.

During World War Two, the field became a major military staging and transport hub. After the war, commercial aviation expanded dramatically, and the airport was rebuilt and expanded multiple times. Today Newark handles more than forty-five million passengers a year, remains one of the three major airports serving the New York metropolitan area, and traces a direct institutional line back to that October morning in nineteen twenty-eight when the first commercial plane touched down on a field of hardened New Jersey marsh.