The 1940 Air Terminal: Streamline Moderne at Hobby Airport
Texas
On September twenty-eighth, nineteen forty, Houston opened a new administration building at its municipal airport, designed by architect Joseph Finger, the same man who had just completed the city's Art Deco city hall a year earlier. The terminal was Streamline Moderne, built with Public Works Administration funds and among the finest examples of nineteen-forties airport architecture remaining in the country. Eastern Airlines and Braniff Airways were the first tenants.
Air travel grew so fast that the building was outgrown within about fifteen years, replaced by a larger terminal in the mid nineteen fifties. It was abandoned entirely by nineteen seventy-eight, left empty for more than two decades. Restoration finally came in the early two thousands, and the building reopened as the nineteen forty Air Terminal Museum in two thousand four.
It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
