JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1799

[Source: Popular Mechanics, September, 1931.]

I am not an architectural historian nor a historian of aviation, but I have looked at a lot of images relating to these fields over the past 30+ years, and so when I find something unusual it makes me pause.  One developing category in this area are rooftop/elevated inner city/downtown airports (I’ve done two earlier posts about this sort of design, including airports designed to be constructed over the Thames and Central Park NYC in Rooftop & Floating Airports -and- Rooftop Airports in a Levitating NYC, 1929  and Elevated, Rooftop Inner City Circular Airports.   I’m not at all certain about what these planners (above) were thinking except that the locations of the airports were central and would save on driving town from the hinterlands to central city–and the “central city” here was London, with the “aerodrome” hosted above King’s Cross and St. Pancras station, and might even have reached Regent’s Park, though I’m not sure.   Evidently there wasn’t much of a concern of the planes missing their runways, or coming in too low, or too fast, or just having an accident–any one of which would wind up in the lap of a busy city rather than in a field somewhere or on a large piece of ground devoid of buildings and a population (where airports are normally situated.  True, there are many airports in this country that are located in urban and suburban sprawls–there was calculated room for error and they were not located right on top of error-proof zones in the middle of a vastly populated areas. So, in the “what were they thinking” department, I clearly do not understand what they were thinking. 

In addition to being a not-very-good-idea, it was also unwholesomely unpretty. And big.