The Marine Air Terminal: the history under LaGuardia
Before the dual skybridges and the $8B rebuild: a 1939 Art Deco rotunda built for flying boats, and a hidden mural that survived the Red Scare.
Every traveler who lands at the new LaGuardia passes within a few hundred yards of the oldest, strangest, and most beautiful building on the field — and almost none of them notice it. It’s the Marine Air Terminal, the airport’s original 1939–40 terminal, known today as Terminal A. We took our name from it. Here’s why.
Built for boats that flew
When LaGuardia opened, the glamorous way to cross an ocean wasn’t a jet — it was a flying boat, a long-range aircraft that took off and landed on water. The Marine Air Terminal was built specifically for them: it served Pan American Airways’ transatlantic clippers, including the great Boeing 314 “Yankee Clipper.” Passengers checked in beneath an Art Deco rotunda, walked out to the water’s edge, and boarded an aircraft that lifted off Bowery Bay like a seaplane. It was, for a brief window before the war and before the runway-based airliner won, the front door to Europe by air.
The terminal opened in the spring of 1940 and was designed by William Adams Delano of the firm Delano & Aldrich — a serious architect, not an airport functionary. What he produced is one of the finest surviving examples of Art Deco aviation architecture in the United States: a circular terminal whose exterior frieze of flying fish rings the building, a rotunda full of light, the whole thing scaled to the optimism of an age that genuinely believed the future arrived by air and landed on water.
The largest WPA mural — and the paint-over
Inside the rotunda is the terminal’s secret: “Flight,” a mural by the painter James Brooks, created under the federal Works Progress Administration art program. It is enormous — roughly 12 feet tall and 237 feet long, wrapping the curved wall of the rotunda — and it is reckoned the largest WPA mural ever made. It depicts the history of human flight, from myth toward the machine, in the muscular, optimistic public style of New Deal art.
Then the country’s mood turned. In 1952, at the height of the Red Scare, the mural was deemed politically suspect — its style and its origins read, to the suspicious eye of the era, as subversive — and it was painted over. For years “Flight” simply vanished beneath a coat of paint, an entire wall of WPA art hidden in plain sight in a working terminal. It was only later restored, brought back from under the overpaint, and it survives in the rotunda today. There are few better small parables of twentieth-century America than a mural celebrating human aspiration, buried by fear, and recovered.
The Marine Air Terminal is still in use — for smaller commercial and charter operations — which means the rotunda and the mural aren’t a museum piece behind glass. They’re part of a functioning, if quiet, corner of one of the busiest airports in the country.
How it fits the airport you land at now
The contrast with the rest of LaGuardia could hardly be sharper. The airport you arrive at today is the product of an $8 billion ground-up rebuild, substantially complete in January 2025, that replaced the cramped, much-maligned old facility with two new terminals. The new Terminal B — about $5.1 billion — won Skytrax’s World’s Best New Airport Terminal in 2023 and carries a 5-star Skytrax rating, with a signature pair of dual skybridges that aircraft taxi beneath, an engineering flourish visible from the road. The new Terminal C, roughly $4 billion, is Delta’s hub. The whole airport is named, of course, for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the man who insisted New York deserved an airport inside its own city limits.
And tucked at the edge of all that glass and steel, predating it by more than eighty years, is the round brick terminal built for boats that flew. The new LaGuardia is rightly celebrated. But the Marine Air Terminal is the part that remembers what flying once meant — when an Atlantic crossing was an event, when the architecture tried to match the romance of the journey, and when a wall could hold a 237-foot painting of the dream of flight.
Why we’re named for it
We are Marine Air Press because this corridor — LGA to Manhattan — deserves a publisher with a sense of where it begins. The airport at the Queens end of every trip we write about isn’t just a set of for-hire pickup zones and toll routes; it’s a place with a rotunda, a hidden mural, and a history older than the jet age. We cover the fares and the tolls obsessively because that’s the job. But we took the name from the oldest building on the field as a small reminder that the eight miles into Manhattan start somewhere with a story worth knowing.
How we report fares. Every figure in this bulletin is grounded in 2026 public sources — the MTA, the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission, the Port Authority and the MTA Congestion Relief Zone tariff — and re-checked each fare cycle. Found something out of date? Tell the desk.