Big Apple History . Arts and Entertainment . Incredible Optimism


	The statue of Atlas near Radio City.

In November 1937, La Guardia was re-elected by the largest majority in the city's history. After learning that he had been re-elected La Guardia declared: "We're going to make the city a real heaven." Some would argue he already had. Gone were the greedy dreams of individual stock speculators and Tammany politicians. New highways, new housing, new playgrounds, new bridges, new tunnels, new subway lines, new sewers, new schools, new arts centers -- this was the reality of the new community-friendly New York City. The La Guardia government had turned New Yorker's wildest dreams into reality!

Rockefeller Center was one of the symbols of New York reborn. Construction on the center began in 1931 and was completed in the late 1930s, it was a complex of high-rise buildings, which included NBC's broadcast center -- Radio City, the RKO Studios, and Radio City Music Hall, then the greatest movie theater in the world. Tourists came from all over the country to see it and the cool new features that came with it including, restaurants, shops, a giant Christmas tree, an ice-skating rink, an observation deck, and the Rainbow Room nightclub. As many as 900,000 people attended NBC broadcasts in NBC's 27 studios, and many came to see the performances of the chorus line of Rockettes, famous for their high kicks and choreographed numbers.

Rockefeller Center not only brought in tourists, it also housed so many powerful media businesses that it was profitable from the outset. NBC, RKO, the Associated Press, and Time-Life all had their headquarters in the complex. Because of these tenants and the Center's powerful radio broadcasting towers, Rockefeller Center was the symbol of New York as America's media Mecca.

In addition to the media technologies of radio and film, another important twentieth-century technological breakthrough was the commercial airplane. New York did not have its own airport and, from his first day as mayor, La Guardia worked to get New York the airport it deserved. In the early 1930s, when La Guardia came to office, the only way to get to New York by air was to fly to nearby New Jersey's Newark Airport.

La Guardia thought that for New York not to have its own airport was shameful. On one flight back from Chicago, the mayor refused to deplane at Newark. He said he would not get out until he had landed on New York soil. As the plane's only remaining passenger, La Guardia was flown to the only public landing strip in the city, Floyd Bennett Field.

La Guardia used New Deal money to build the airport of his dreams. La Guardia Airport was the biggest publicly funded project of its kind. When completed, it had airplane hangars the size of Madison Square Garden, runways that were each more than a mile long, and it boasted the most powerful searchlight in the world. La Guardia insisted on New York having its own airport because he knew that the city had always been ahead of the curve in every other area of transportation and communications technology. Under La Guardia's watch, New York did not lose its technological edge.