Marine Air Terminal

The Marine Air Terminal stands at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York, designed by the architect William Delano of the firm Delano and Aldrich in the Art Deco style and opened in 1940 as part of the airport's original development beginning the previous year. Its circular two-story main structure, flanked by a pair of one-story wings, was built specifically to serve Pan American Airways' Boeing 314 Clipper flying boats on their transatlantic passenger routes, landing and departing from the adjacent waters of Bowery Bay rather than a runway. The building's exterior carries a terracotta frieze of some 2,200 individual tiles depicting yellow flying fish against blue waves, and inside its two-story rotunda, finished in marble floors and walls, the artist James Brooks painted a 237-foot mural in 1942 tracing the history of flight from mythological imagery through modern transatlantic aviation. That mural was controversially painted over in 1952 during a period of political suspicion toward its left-leaning artist, and it was not restored and returned to public view until 1980. The Marine Air Terminal survives today as one of the few purpose-built flying boat terminals still standing anywhere in the world, a rare physical record of the brief era of transatlantic seaplane travel.