If in 2023 we are commemorating notable anniversaries in the preservation of Long Island’s East End—the 40th of the Peconic Land Trust and the 30th of Southampton Town’s wetlands building restrictions—it may be time to look farther back, 75 years, to another pivotal sequence of events. These speak to why there is no commercial jetport accommodating the Hamptons.
First a necessary nod: There is MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma, 35 miles west of the Shinnecock Canal demarcation line, where various commercial carriers have tried to establish a foothold. And there is the East Hampton Airport in Wainscott, controversial enough even with only private planes and ticketed helicopter service. But there is no airliner access convenient enough to funnel material numbers to the area, just as there are no vehicle bridges to bring in multitudes from across Long Island Sound. Both could have happened, however, and life would be much different “out East” today if they had.
An airport almost did get set in motion, and that tale is still reverberating. Back in its farming and fishing heyday, Suffolk County had airfields, but the bigger early ones were given over to the third leg of the local mid-20th century economy year-around, the military. The Pentagon was supported by runways in Westhampton, at an Air Force base, and northwestward in Calverton, at the Grumman Aircraft test site.
By 1948, the peace dividend from World War II was being cashed and the Pentagon’s perceived need for the Westhampton strip had ended. It was turned over, gratis, to the Suffolk County supervisors (as the government was then structured) for the good of public aviation. Having no immediate travel market, the supes leased a big chunk of the 1,500 acres to an intermediary of the National Aircraft Maintenance Corp. Namco, as it was called, apparently serviced one major client, the new Arabian American Oil Co, aka Aramco, which was ramping up its post-war fields in Saudi Arabia. It needed engineers and roustabouts from the U.S., and brought them to Westhampton’s barracks for preparation and then put them on DC-4s for the Gulf.
Like so many Saudi deals, this one soon got rocky. By 1950 Suffolk County and Namco were at loggerheads over how the air-base property was being maintained for its larger aviation purposes. A legal battle ensued that would last through the 1950s, but by early 1951 other foreign affairs intervened. The U.S. was in battle again, in Korea, and the peace dividend was a casualty of the incipient Cold War. Under a “national emergency” declaration, the Air Force took back Westhampton as a training center and “forward interception base.”
As the Korean conflict dragged on, the military occupation grew less welcome in nearby villages. As early as May 1952, Southampton school officials were complaining about low-flying aircraft. But this was still otherwise a sleepy period in the Hamptons—so much so that a missile-launch area was quietly maintained two miles west of the base–and the Air Force stuck around through the 1960s even as Vietnam made its presence seem still less benign. By December 1969, moreover, local land had gotten more precious and was prime for the subdividing. In their last major action as Suffolk County’s governing body, the supervisors (soon to be replaced by a legislature) moved to reacquire the Air Force base as part of a planned countywide airport network.
Let’s zoom out here to appreciate the aerial “approach.” Various state and regional officials in the 1960s had big plans for the East End, and transport was part of them. Part of the action was the aerospace industry that developed mid-island but extended east, most notably to a huge spread reaching to the Peconic River in Calverton/Wading River. The Navy (Top Gun division) had acquired the land in the Korean War period and then turned over operations to major Long Island contractor Grumman. This would last for decades, until the post-Vietnam contraction began to shrink the defense industry’s Long Island footprint. (Also, the water-facing fifth of the property became, after the 1970s, the Calverton National Cemetery.)
But Calverton-Grumman was much in the sights of growth-minded planners for the Hamptons and the North Fork. In 1965, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller proposed the site for a fourth major New York metro area airport. This, along with other ideas Rocky had for the East End, aroused opposition and was tabled–but not before Suffolk County officials had also begun talking up some kind of jetport serving Long Island’s twin forks.
That was the context for the 1969 Suffolk move back into Westhampton. By this point, County Executive H. Lee Dennison, who had earlier surfaced the jetport ambitions, was distancing himself from anything but general aviation (private planes) there or at Calverton. Still, he wanted to coordinate such arrangements as part of his master-planning push for the long-untutored East End. Dennison’s general-aviation airport aims included the quiet strip–still active–near Lake Montauk.
The preservationist movement that sprang up from the 1970s on took most of the remaining fuel out of air-travel expansionism for the Hamptons, but the business imperative for long-runway access hadn’t gone away. As Grumman’s presence in Calverton neared an end in 1991, Gov. Mario Cuomo joined in a push by commercial boosters for a “limited” cargo jetport there. East End politicians by this point wanted nothing to do with that. So the Grumman property was turned over to the town of Riverhead, which includes the Calverton hamlet and has wrestled for 25 years with what to make of it. More on that below.
Meanwhile, in Westhampton, the military departure was again short lived: By the end of 1970, an Air National Guard unit was posted there and a version of it (now used for rescue operations) has remained since, with Suffolk County as co-operator for private aircraft. Named in 1991 for Francis Gabreski, a wartime fighter pilot later employed by Grumman and briefly head of the Long Island Rail Road, the facility remains a favorite landing pad for official visits, including U.S. presidents coming to Hamptons political fund-raisers. Other arrivals, though, are few. Surrounding woods came to be protected by a campaign to save the area’s Pine Barrens even as equally long efforts commenced to develop a nearby business park including a (flightless) Amazon distribution center.
As that buildout project finally is reaching fruition, Calverton remains a conundrum. The old test-flight base became a cleanup project for the state and the Navy while Riverhead officials have stumbled through years of false starts on jobs-producing redevelopment. At one point a 35-story artificial ski mountain was envisioned, and various casino and auto-racing ideas have been floated. But the latest iteration of the 2,900-acre Enterprise Park known as EPCAL is technology-oriented. Seems neighbors don’t like the congestion they associate with the plans, however, and are especially leery of—you guessed it–prospective use as a cargo jetport for the tenants.
The result of these 75 years of grounded ambitions is that only the most wealthy and well-connected can fly “private” to within minutes of the East End experience, and that goods to satisfy the resident affluence must come as well by a sliver of roads and rail. Enough people and freight still make the often-slow journey, but not nearly in the turnover volumes that would have happened had the Hamptons aviation story tuned out differently.
Tim W. Ferguson 