You are welcome to camp on an airstrip in New York City. Which sounds terrible. But this is Floyd Bennett Field, which opened in 1931 as the first municipal airport in New York City and is today a federal park as part of the Gateway National Recreation Area (itself a wonder: a 26,607-acre park surrounding New York Harbor preserved for wildlife and opened for tent camping).
Departing on bicycle from Park Slope, it’s about a seven-mile pedal east through Brooklyn to the airfield, which juts into Jamaica Bay directly across from JFK International Airport. I met up with about 200 other “Floyders,” a group of revelers organized by the political organizer and bicycling advocate John Raskin. In the brush beside one of the old runways, I pitched tent in a grassy knoll and immediately joined a dozen other Floyders for a tour of Hangar B, which houses historic planes and old engines and grey-haired grandpas who volunteer there a few times a week and regal visitors with the history…
The first-ever solo flight around the world departed from and finished on Floyd Bennett Field. It hosted the landing of a young John Glenn’s record-setting transcontinental flight from Los Angeles of 3 hours, 23 minutes, and 8.4 seconds in 1957. The field also helped another pilot earn the nickname Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan in 1938 when he set off for California but found himself instead, after a 28-hour flight, in Dublin, Ireland.
Not that I’m really into airplanes. The mix of engines and grease and combustion seems like some kinds of unholy combination of overeating and heavy drinking and belching. I could care less about Nascar racing or jet shows. But visiting Floyd Bennet Field was like traveling back in time, or venturing into some secret world.
Dante, one of the grey-haired volunteers who helps upkeep the planes and advocates for the facility, said that Hanger B’s roof sustained damage during Superstorm Sandy and its future is now in question. Funds are limited. Visitation is minimal. Staffing is unpaid, aside from a token $20 a month for volunteers to buy coffee, according to Dante.
“We need strong young guys like you,” he told me. “Not just a bunch of donut-eaters.”
I refrained from telling Dante that I love donuts; that my mother brought me to Dunkin Donuts every Friday during high school; that my first-ever stock investment was in the global donut chain Krispy Kreme; that I still seek out glazed crullers. Instead I nodded my head and thought: I could be friends with Dante.
Here’s how The New York Times described its visit to the the so-called Historic Aircraft Restoration Projects:
… we wandered among the relics of aviation history as a 1940s soundtrack echoed through the hanger, and a Navy vet named Bob Weiss let us climb up inside a Lockheed P2V-5 Neptune patrol bomber, the kind of submarine-hunting plane he’d flown in during the Cuban missile crisis. Very, very cool, and again I realized that though I’ve been in hundreds of planes, I’d almost never touched the outer hull of one.
