John F. Kennedy International Airport
Facts on JFK
JFK airport opened in 1948 as New York International Airport but was commonly known as Idlewild (after the golf course it replaced); it was renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 24, 1963, just over a month after President Kennedy's assassination.
Source: Wikipedia
The airport is named for John F. Kennedy, elected president in 1960 at age 43 — still the youngest person ever elected to the office — who had commanded a Navy PT boat in the Pacific during World War II; he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, less than three years into his term.
Source: Wikipedia
New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. proposed renaming Idlewild for the slain president; the City Council made it official on December 24, 1963, a month and two days after the assassination, changing the name of America's busiest international gateway almost overnight.
Source: Wikipedia
The freshly renamed Kennedy Airport was first assigned the code KIA -- but in 1968 it was changed to JFK specifically to avoid the unfortunate association with "killed in action," a term with grim resonance during the Vietnam War era.
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By 1954, Idlewild (as JFK was then known) already had the highest volume of international air traffic of any airport in the world, and today JFK remains the busiest international commercial gateway in North America.
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JFK's site was Jamaica Bay marshland that included the Idlewild Beach golf course; construction began in 1943, and the project was briefly named Major General Alexander E. Anderson Airport, after a Queens National Guard commander, before it opened on July 1, 1948, with a ceremony attended by President Truman and Governor Dewey.
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Rather than build one shared terminal, the Port Authority let each major airline design and build its own terminal building under a 1955 plan by architect Wallace Harrison, giving the airport its distinctive ring of separately styled terminal buildings around a central control tower.
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Trans World Airlines opened Eero Saarinen's swooping, bird-winged TWA Flight Center in 1962; after the airline folded in 2001 the building sat empty until JetBlue's Terminal 5 opened around it in 2008, and the original Saarinen head house was later converted into the TWA Hotel.
Source: Wikipedia