New York MINUTE
Flicking through some old stuff, Kevin comes across a timeless little item of Big Apple history
It’s a conundrum. Now that smoking’s no longer cool, what do we do with the cool paraphernalia that sometimes went with it, like cigarette lighters and ashtrays? Some hold special family memories.
Take the 1960s cigarette lighter I’ve photographed. It was a promotional gift given to my travel-agent dad by Pan American World Airways, popularly known as Pan Am. It stands nearly as high as my cellphone and it’s a miniature of Pan Am’s famous skyscraper in New York’s Manhattan.
In the ’60s, I thought Pan Am represented everything chic in international air travel. Even the spaceplane in my favourite movie, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, had Pan Am insignia. But the ultimate was that the Pan Am skyscraper, the world’s largest office building at the time, had a helicopter landing pad on its roof – another world-first. This was fabulous for Pan Am’s passengers. They could take the elevator to the top floor, have a beer and meal at the penthouse restaurant, then be choppered off to any of New York’s airports; a trip of just 10 minutes. But if you worked in any of the adjacent highrises, the constant thundering rotors of the giant helicopters drove you nuts. A campaign to force Pan Am to drop the service was successful, but 10 years later the airline got a second crack at it, using quieter helicopters.
Then in 1977, disaster! A Pan Am helicopter tipped over after it had landed on the roof and was offloading passengers. The still-spinning rotors slammed into the landing pad, causing mayhem. Five people were killed, one a pedestrian down on the street. The result: Pan Am would never fly its helicopters from that rooftop again. The glamorous age of urban air taxis was over. It wasn’t long before the airline itself went into decline. Pan American World Airways went bust in 1991.
The planes disappeared, but Pan Am memorabilia continues to attract attention – anything from uniforms and flight bags to tickets. I’ve always been intrigued by the wonderful detail in my dad’s Pan Am cigarette lighter. I can even tell you how many floors made up the World’s
Largest Office Building just by carefully studying it. There are 59. And don’t check that out on Wiki. I’ve already done it. The building still stands in Manhattan’s Park Avenue, but it’s now named
The Metlife Building.
They could take the elevator to the top floor, have a beer and meal at the penthouse restaurant and be choppered off to any of New York’s airports