The Gala Amusement Park opened on the land that now holds LaGuardia in the late 1890s.
Source: Curbed
The park was owned by the Steinway family, who also launched a piano company in 1853 that's still in operation today.
In 1929, the park became a private airfield. It was called the Glenn H. Curtis Airport, named after the famed aviation pioneer from Long Island.
Source: 6sqft
Six years later, it became a commercial airport called North Beach Airport. It had just three hangars (buildings for storing planes) and three runways, the largest of which measured 2,300 feet. For comparison, the average runway today is at least 8,000 feet.
Besides another small airport in Brooklyn, North Beach Airport was the only airport in New York City. (Another in Newark, New Jersey was much larger.) In the late 1930s, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia called for a larger airport to serve the city.
After a $23 million redevelopment, the city transformed North Beach into the New York Municipal Airport-LaGuardia Field in 1939.
The airport opened with four runways, ranging from 4,500 to 6,000 feet long. The nation's five largest airlines at the time — Pan American Airways, American, United, Eastern Air Lines, and Transcontinental and Western Air — began offering flights from the new airport.
Visitors could pay a dime to go up to the airport's observation tower, or enjoy a meal at its restaurant while they waited for flights.
"New York Municipal Airport-LaGuardia Field" was a mouthful, so the city changed the name to LaGuardia Airport in 1947.
Although LaGuardia was considered a large airport when it was built, it soon proved too small for the city growing around it. Many international flights were moved to JFK Airport in the 1960s.
Today, LaGuardia is one of the busiest airports in New York. In 2015, it served 31.4 million passengers.
Over the years, the airport's outdated facilities have struggled to handle NYC's increasing demand for flights. LaGuardia's short taxiways have made it one of the the most delay-plagued airports in the country.
Source: The New York Times