History

Travel Tidbits from an airport near you

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Wouldn’t it be nice right now to be making your way to an airport and getting ready to visit a new city or an old favorite?

That time will come. For now, here are some tidbits from airports around the country.

Pay respects to civil rights icon John Lewis at ATL Airport

In April 2019, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) unveiled an exhibit in the domestic atrium titled “John Lewis – Good Trouble” to honor the longtime U.S. Congressman and civil rights icon.

Lewis died late last week, on July 17, and the exhibit has turned into a memorial tribute where travelers can stop and pay respects.

New Concourse E extension at PDX Airport

Courtesy Port of Portland

We shared the news last week about the opening of the new Concourse E extension at Portland International Airport (PDX).

Here’s a bit more about the project.

The extension brings the first new gates to PDX in more nearly 20 years and offers views of Mt. Hood and the Columbia Rivier.

The new concourse extension also features two aerial sculptures by Jacob Hashimoto featuring 11,000 paper kits and 450 different graphics representing Portland’s river, bridges, and neighborhoods.

Hashimoto’s PDX artwork may be familiar to travelers. He also has his work displayed at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), in the lobby of SFO Grand Hyatt.

A new concourse at Nashville International Airport too

Portland isn’t the airport that cut the ribbon on a new concourse last week.

On Friday, July 17, the first Southwest Airlines flight took off from Nashville International Airport’s (BNA) new $292 million Concourse D.

https://twitter.com/Fly_Nashville/status/1284259427462402049?s=20

Texas Ranger statue removed from Dallas Love Field

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Courtesy Dallas Love Field

Statues are toppling and being taken down around the country because the historical figures they portray had a role in the oppression of others.

Included in this movement is the removal of the iconic Texas Ranger statue from the main lobby at Dallas Love Field Airport.

The 12-foot-tall bronze statue has been on display at the airport on and off since 1963 but was taken down in early June.

City officials decided to remove the statue. Their decision was prompted by published excerpts from a new book documenting the history of the Texas Rangers law enforcement agency and its connections to brutality and racism, the Dallas News reported.

In his book “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers“, and in an article published in D Magazine, Doug J. Swanson explains how during almost 200 years of patrolling Texas, many Texas Rangers “performed countless acts of bravery and heroism.”

But, Swanson says, some Texas Rangers were also responsible for “terrifying atrocities, including massacres on the Texas-Mexico border.”

The Texas Ranger statue that was at Dallas Love Field turned out to be especially problematic.

Sgt. E.J. “Jay” Banks, the Texas Ranger who served as the model for the statue at Dallas Love Field, was the commanding Ranger on the scene in 1956 when attempts were made to integrate the high school in Mansfield, near Dallas.

“But unlike state police in other Southern racial hotspots, the Rangers in Mansfield did not escort black students past howling mobs of white supremacists. They had been sent instead to keep the black children out of a white school,” Swanson writes, “A wire service photo showed [Banks] casually leaning against a tree outside Mansfield High. To his left, above the school’s entrance, was a dummy in blackface, hanging from a noose.”

What will happen to the statue – the spot it once filled at Dallas Love Field Airport?

According to an airport spokesman, “It has been placed into storage and the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture will lead the conversations and decisions as to what will happen to it next. There is no plan at this time to place anything else in that space.”

Vintage travel posters to inspire a post-pandemic trip

Aviation history, History, , , , ,
Courtesy Boston Public Library

If you have been heeding the shelter-at-home advisories during this health crisis you may be organizing your photos and looking through scrapbooks from past trips.

Here’s something else to add your list: planning your next trip using the collections of vintage travel posters we came across while researching this fun story for AAA Washington as inspiration.

Here are some of the vintage travel poster images we enjoyed.

Smithsonian Institution Air & Space Museum

Courtesy National Air & Space Museum

About 1300 airline posters dating from the early 1920s to the present are on the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum website.

SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport  

Courtesy SFO Museum

More than 1200 travel posters promoting global air travel are in the collection of the SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport. Most are accessible online.

Boston Public Library

Courtesy Boston Public Library

More than 350 travel posters are in the collection of the Boston Public Library, which shares them on Flickr.

Library of Congress – WPA Travel Posters

Courtesy Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has hundreds of travel posters in its collection, including the now-iconic travel and tourism posters promoting national parks and other U.S. destinations made by artists hired by Works Projects Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1943.

Space Tourism Posters

Why not consider a trip to space?

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers a series of specially-commissioned WPA-style posters promoting space tourism. 

Nellie Bly landing soon at Pittsburgh Int’l Airport

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Nellie Bly – Courtesy Library of Congress

We take a short break from coronavirus coverage and anxiety today to give a cheer for Pittsburgh International Airport, which is celebrating Women’s History Month by putting a statue of legendary traveler and early investigative journalist Nellie Bly in the terminal.

Bly, the pen name for Elizabeth Seaman Cochran, grew up in Western Pennsylvania and in 1885 went to work for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, which is now the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She moved to New York City in 1887 to work for the New York World and wrote a groundbreaking expose of the terrible conditions at a mental institution by posing as a patient.

In 1889 she set off for a trip about the world, determined to break the fictional record of Phileas Fogg, whose journey was described by Jules Verne in his 1873 novel, “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

Bly left Hoboken, New Jersey by ship and completed the trip in 72 days, 6 hours 11 minutes and 14 seconds, traveling by horse, rickshaw, sampan, burro and other vehicles along the way.

Courtesy University of Iowa Libraries

“Round the World” board game. Courtesy University of Iowa Libraries.

Her 1890 book chronicling the adventure is “Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.”

Pittsburgh International Airport already has two statues in the terminal: George Washington and Franco Harris, a legendary Pittsburgh Steelers player.

Those statues are stationed in the PIT terminal as promotions for the city’s Heinz History Center and are popular spots for selfies.

At the end of March, to mark Women’s History Month and the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the Heinz History Center will add Nellie Bly’s statue to the PIT terminal.

Courtesy PIT Airport. Photo by Beth Hollerich

Airports named for U.S. Presidents

Aviation history, History, , ,

For Presidents Day, what else but a list of U.S. airports named for presidents:

Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport (SPI) in Springfield, Ill.

New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)

Gerald R. Ford International Airport (GRR) in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Washington, D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA)

George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) in Houston, Texas

Dickinson Theodore Roosevelt Regional Airport (DIK) – Dickinson, North Dakota

Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport (LIT) – Little Rock, Arkansas

Witchita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport

Any airports I missed? Or any you’d like to rename for certain presidents?

California’s role in aviation history? A quiz.

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Here’s an aviation history quiz:

What do the first major U.S. airshow, the first and only flight of the Spruce Goose and SpaceX have in common?

Hughes H-4 Hercules (“Spruce Goose”) model. Courtesy SFO Museum

California.

This nice timeline created by Air New Zealand lays out some notable events, people and aviation products from the Golden State.

Not in the timeline?  The first airport hotel, opened at Oakland International Airport in 1929. See my story about hotel and other at-the-airport inns in my “At the Airport” column on USA TODAY.

In the meantime, here’s ANZ’s timline of California Aviation.

Happy 90th Birthday, Miami Int’l Airport

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Miami International Airport is celebrating it 90th birthday.

To honor the 90th anniversary of Miami International, the airport opened an art exhibit titled MIA: A Hub for History, featuring airport memorabilia from the last nine decades.

Developed in partnership with the History Miami Museum and the Wolfson Archives,  the exhibit features vintage photographs, posters, uniforms and videos of celebrity MIA arrivals from the airport’s first flight on 15 September 1928 up to the present.

Here are some tweets from the day.

https://twitter.com/WolfsonArchives/status/1040616749224407040

https://twitter.com/WolfsonArchives/status/1040994401986723845

https://twitter.com/WolfsonArchives/status/1040979300797693957

Lost airport amenity: Lindbergh’s monocoupe leaving St. Louis airport

Aviation history, Exhibits, History, , ,

For years, the 1934 Model D-127 Monocoupe once owned by aviator Charles Lindbergh has been on display at St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL), over the Concourse C security checkpoint in Terminal 1.

But the airplane, which has been on loan to the airport from the Missouri Historical Society since 1979, is coming down for good on Tuesday June 12 and put away for what is described as a “much neeed rest.”

“The 1934 Lindbergh Monocoupe is an exceedingly rare aircraft in that it still retains its original fabric covering,” said Katherine Van Allen, managing director of museum services for the Missouri Historical Society, in a statement, “In order to ensure that this unique piece of history is preserved for future generations, the Missouri Historical Society is removing the plane to a humidity and climate-controlled storage facility in accordance with present-day best practices in collections care.”

 

According to the Missouri History Museum, which received the plane in 1940, Lindbergh flew this airplane regularly, but didn’t really love it.

And even though he’d had it personalized extensively, he wrote that “It is one of the most difficult planes to handle I have ever flown. The take-off is slow…and the landing tricky…[it] is almost everything an airplane ought not to be.”

Still, it is an aviation treasure. And one that could have been lost to history back in April 2011 when a tornado hit the airport, doing millions of dollars of damage. By luck, Lindergh’s monocoupe had been moved to a storage facility just a few weeks before, in preparation for scheduled terminal renovations.

Here’s a video of the plane being rehung in the airport in 2013:

­

 

https://vimeo.com/77450464

 

When you visit STL,  you’ll still see an airplane suspended from the ceiling over a Terminal 2 checkpoint. That plane is also owned by the Missouri Historical Society, but it’s a 1933 Red Monocoupe 110 Special with no link to Lindbergh.

 

Munich Airport Christmas Market

Airports, Entertainment, family travel, History, ,

Munich Airport’s Christmas and Winter Market is open – so here’s hoping you have a long layover here.

For the 19th consecutive year, the large covered space between the Munich Airport terminals has been transformed into a winter wonderland with more than 40 kiosks in among 450 real Christmas trees and plenty of seasonal treats and local handicrafts.

Better yet, at the center of the market is a free ice-skating rink (with low-cost skate rentals) where visitors can try out Eisstockschiessen, Bavaria’s broom-free version of curling.

Entertainment is offered daily, except Mondays, starting at 6 pm, with a wide range of live musical acts, including jazz, swing, gospel, rock and pop bands and, every Thursday at 6pm, a DJ spins tunes for the skaters on the ice. Each Wednesday starting at 4 p.m. an evening of family-oriented fairytale performances and magic shows is scheduled.

Sound like fun at the airport? Munich Airport’s Christmas and Winter Market is open daily from 11am – pm through December 30.

Souvenir Sunday: read an illustrated history of travel

Aviation history, Books, History, Hotels, Souvenir Sunday,

Journey – an Illustrated History of Travel, published by DK in association with the Smithsonian Institution, arrived in the mail a few weeks back and our household has been leafing through it since then.

It’s a big coffee table-style book – 440 pages, in full color and pretty heavy – and is separated into 7 chapters, or “ages,” each tackling advances, experiences and the means by which humans have made their way around the world.

Chapters 1 through 3 tackle the Ancient World (including travel in ancient Egypt and the travels of Odysseus and Alexander the Great), travel that powered trade and conquests, including the travels of Marco Polo, and The Age of Discovery, when explorers set out to find “new” parts of the world.

Chapters 4 through 7 dig deep into the ‘The Age of Empires’, ‘The Age of Steam,’ ‘The Golden Age of Travel,’ and “The Age of Flight,’ with lots more achival images, historic maps, artifact images, bits of journals, and works of art.

I was delighted to find a spread on the Wunderkammern – or curiosity cabinets – that collectors began putting together in the 16th century to show off souvenirs such as shells, preserved animals, scientific and mechanical obects, and other odd tidbits they’d picked up on far off journeys or purchased from others who had gone on adventures.

The three voyages of Captian Cook are detailed, as are the inventions and inventors that brought the world flight.

There are sections on the rise of the manufactured souvenir, World’s Fairs, Grand Hotels, luggage labels, national parks, efforts to create maps that accurately reflect the world and parts of it, camping, Route 66, travel to every corner of the world, the Jet Age, space travel – and much, much more.

Towards the end of this big book there’s a section of biographies stretching from Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, to Amelia Earhart, Thor Heyerdahl, Ernest Shackleton, and Amerigo Vespucci.

This one is a keeper and a good gift for anyone interested in travel or history.

All images from Journey – an Illustrated History of Travel.