By Philip Newman
Thanks to LaGuardia Community College, fourth graders are discovering that one of the nation’s busiest airports used to be an amusement park where people once rode roller-coasters and sent postcards from resort hotels.
The LaGuardia-Wagner Archives of the Long Island City school has published a booklet for schoolchildren, “From Boardwalks to Runways: Change in a Queens Neighborhood (1886-1939).”
It is a curriculum for fourth-grade pupils on the history of LaGuardia airport.
“This curriculum recognizes that history is not just about memorizing dates and names of leaders or causes of particular wars,” said Dr. Richard Lieberman, director of the archives. “It is about exploring materials that piece together the story of a particular time in history.”
The New York State Board of Regents in 1988 ordered that all fourth graders learn local history and since then the LaGuardia-Wagner Archives has been developing curriculums using sources preserved in its repository.
“The mandate of the Board of Regents was set out but there were no existing materials to support curriculums to teach the subject so the teachers found themselves looking to other resources to supply them with information,” Lieberman said. “The college’s archives became one of these resources.”
The 18-page booklet for fourth graders includes six lessons. In the first lesson, the youthful historians learn that the airport was built on the site of the North Beach Bowery Bay Gala Amusement Park. It was a vacation resort with rides, hotels, restaurants and bathing beaches and was popular until 1919 when Prohibition, which outlawed the sale of alcoholic drinks nationwide, led to its demise.
From then on, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, an aviation enthusiast who was a combat pilot in World War I, dreamed of building an airport on the site of the amusement park and his vision became reality on Sept. 21, 1939.
Lisa Sita, associate project director of the curriculum, said history is not the only subject taught to the students. The project also includes lessons that test the pupils’ math skills, reading comprehension, map reading and critical thinking.
The booklet includes photos showing how people relaxed just before the turn of the 20th century, including scenes of beaches, a trolley car at North Beach in 1900 and an illustration of an 1897 season ticket for Silver Spring Bathing Pavilion. It cost $4.
The photos of the new airport give examples of what in 1939 was the latest word in air travel, a row of silver Douglas DC-3 airliners, which carried 21 passengers, at the ultra modern New York Municipal Air Field. Only a few days later, by popular demand, it was renamed for LaGuardia, whose dream came true.
Reach contributing writer Philip Newman by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 136.
