It is almost impossible to take an ugly picture of the terminal at Allegheny County Airport. It was designed by Stanley Roush, the king of public works in Allegheny County. The airport engineer was G. Brooks Ross, shown here hard at work on his plans.
When it opened in 1931, the Allegheny County Municipal Airport was at least arguably the largest and most sophisticated airport in the world. When we consider that 1931 was only four years after Lindbergh’s flight, and that the site and general size of the airport had been decided on in 1928, we realize what a huge gamble this airport was: the future of air travel was unknown, and it required far-sighted faith to believe that an airport of this size would be required in years to come. (Even now a 737 can land here if it’s necessary.) It also required quite a bit of complicated financial trickery from the Republican majority on County Council and their allies, as Post-Gazette cartoonist Cy Hungerford points out.
Under the old county charter, County Council had two members from the majority party and one from the minority party. Everything was done behind the sputtering Democrat’s back, and he found out about it in the papers like the rest of us as the cost of the Municipal Airport went up and up. This, by the way, was one of the last great projects of the Allegheny County Republican machine, before the Democratic tide swept in with Franklin Roosevelt.
The faith was more than justified. By the end of the Second World War, air traffic had increased to such an extent that an even larger airport was needed; and County Airport had already filled its site to the practical limit. Thus Greater Pitt was built out in the western suburbs, and all the scheduled commercial flights moved there. But County Airport, much closer to downtown, remained the favorite airport for private and corporate planes. Today it is still the fifth-busiest airport in Pennsylvania, with about 160 flights a day.
And that is the almost unique combination of needs that pickled this airport in the 1930s. (We say almost unique because Cincinnati’s municipal airport of the same era has survived for the same reasons.) Greater Pitt has been rebuilt twice since it opened in 1952, because the needs of commercial air traffic keep changing. But this airport has remained exactly the right size for the traffic it handles. The striking Art Deco terminal is such a perfect period piece that it often plays The Airport in movies set in the 1930s; except for covering the inscription with a suitable city name (and carefully framing to cut out the more recent control tower), the building is ready for filming.
No current pictures can convey how carefully this airport was designed to make its impression from the air, but fortunately we have this 1941 postcard. Not only was the air traveler supposed to be impressed by the magnificent portal to Pittsburgh, but the design was also—in the days when all air navigation was visual—extraordinarily helpful to pilots. The broad boulevard that leads to the terminal was a fat arrow pointing due north toward the airport. The directions were immediately obvious. For pure decoration, the zigzag patterns of the terminal were echoed in a semicircle of pavement behind the building—now, alas, plain asphalt. Today, the view from above is a cluttered mess, because the airport grew more buildings and the area around it suburbanized. But when it opened in 1931, the airport was a beautiful abstract design from the air, complete with a huge identifying label in the airfield.
Now let’s step inside the terminal and wander around for a bit.
We have dozens of pictures to show you, so to avoid weighing down the front page too much, we’ll put the rest behind this link.
