This site, formerly known as Oakland Municipal Airport, served as the gateway to the Pacific during aviation’s pioneering age of trans-Pacific flight. Among other notable events, Albert Hegenberger and Lester Maitland departed from the airfield on 28 June 1927 on the first flight from the mainland to Hawaii, and Amelia Earhart landed here on 13 January 1935, completing the first-ever solo flight from Hawaii to the mainland.
In May 1927, the same month of Charles A. Lindbergh's famous transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, a fact-finding commission appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce concluded that Newark would be the ideal location for an airfield to serve the greater New York/New Jersey metropolitan area.
Civic leaders wasted no time; construction began on the Newark Airport in January 1928. Nine months and $1,750,000 later, 68 acres of soggy marshland had been filled and converted to an airport.