Port’s most historic property, 5 Sagamore Hill Drive, is ironically a bunch of fenced-in trees, although decades ago, it was a steel plant, and decades before that, it was an international airport. So how on Earth did we end up with an empty 11 acres, sitting right on our waterfront? The unfortunate answer is pollution.
In 1929, the American Aeronautical Company transformed a chunk of Manhasset Isle into an impressive seaplane facility. Capitalizing on the Bay’s relative calmness, the company rented most of the space to seaplane operators, who, at the time, transported international mail. Four years later, Pan American World Airways (commonly known as Pan Am) bought the property and continued its rental, while on the side, the multi-million dollar company was preparing a revolution in air travel. On one end, they were conducting transatlantic test flights with the novel Boeing-314, or the Yankee Clipper, and on the other, they were upgrading Port’s lackluster terminal into an international airport. Although it turned out to be no LaGuardia, it, at the very least, featured its own Customs, Immigration and Public Health department, which was enough to officially house the first transatlantic commercial flight in 1939. Given the flight’s success, Pan Am continued to operate large-scale air travel to and from Manhasset Bay with Britain and France as main destinations.
Pan Am’s use of the property ended around World War II, when the site was repurposed for military production, and that’s really where the controversy starts. Some suspect that during this time, the federal government contaminated the land with numerous pollutants, mainly volatile organic compounds (VOCs), though others blame Thypin Steel, the metal fabrication company that moved in after the war. However, the “who-done-it” is irrelevant, for Richard Thypin, the owner of the steel plant and, currently, the vacant property, had long agreed to remediate the pollutants, and he’s already spent over $2 million doing so. Yet after years of clean-up, there’s still an empty lot in a prime location.
