By Walter Elliott
NEWARK – Newark’s first airport opened for business on Dec. 15, 1919 – but was closed before 1921 had ended.
This is not about what is now Newark Liberty International Airport nor its operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Although the Port Authority has been celebrating its centennial throughout 2021, the City of Newark did not begin leasing its municipal airport to them until 1948.
Newark Municipal Airport was still a South Ward salt marsh when Heller Aviation Field, eight miles to its northwest, officially opened Dec. 15, 1919. Mayor Charles P. Gillen, landowner Peter E. Heller and 1,000 spectators witnessed Post Office Department officials cut a ribbon before Heller Field’s hangar off Manchester Place in the North Ward.
Heller Field became part of an inaugural transcontinental U.S. Air Mail system that linked Washington, D.C. and New York City with Bellefonte, Pa. and points west after World War One. Pilots, fresh from the war, were carrying sacks of express mail aboard modified former Martin or De Haviland bombers.
The end of the “War to End All Wars” was in sight when the Post Office Department (now USPS) started looking for places to set up its air express network in late 1918. The Newark Board of Trade and Peter Heller approached them about leasing a 50-acre triangular tract near the city’s northwestern corner by Belleville.
Peter Heller and his younger brothers owned property in Newark’s Forest Hill and Woodside sections and in Belleville. They made their fortune from the file and hand tool factory their father, Elias, had started at Mt. Prospect Avenue by the Erie Railroad Greenwood Lake Division tracks. (Heller Parkway, back then, was Branch Brook Park’s northern border.)
Peter Heller, through the Board of Trade, and the post office signed a two-year lease for $150,000 (over $2.367 million in 2021 dollars). A 900-to-1,000-ft. east-west airstrip was carved out, a hangar erected, and a new low-frequency radio transmitter was installed.
The plan was to have pilots be partially guided by radio once they had either spotted the Passaic River or cleared the Orange Mountains. Postal trucks would meet the planes to take mail sacks to the main Newark Post Office at Broad and Canal Streets (now Raymond Boulevard) for sorting and New York delivery.
Pilots Walter H. Stevens and Frederick A. Robinson showed that it could be done at Heller Field. Stevens landed his Martin twin-engined biplane from Washington’s College Park Dec. 6; Robinson and his Martin took off for Washington 6:44 a.m. Dec. 8.
The strip and hangar, however, were on a triangular lot whose eastern apex was formed by the Erie Orange Branch to its southwest and the Greenwood Lake trunk line to its northwest. The Morris Canal, Meadow Brook and the First River formed its west and northwest borders.
There were a pair of smokestacks of the Tiffany silver factory, standing 50 and 90 feet tall north from and across the street of Forest Hill Junction Station, to also clear.
Pilots found the landing approaches and takeoffs difficult on clear days, let alone under inclement conditions, year-round. Frequent near-misses, several crashes and three fatal accidents followed.
Stevens was landing his Martin when several children ran onto the field Dec. 13, 1919. He swerved towards a railroad embankment to avoid most of them – but one of his propellers struck and killed a child.
Capt. Harry Conley Sherlock, born in England but an East Orange resident of 15 years, was bringing his De Haviland No. 72 from Bellefonte in for a landing 2:45 p.m. March 30, 1920. He hit the taller smokestack instead, breaking up his plane and scattering bricks.
Factory workers and local boys extricated Sherlock, 22, and took him to the Tiffany dispensary – where he died from a broken neck.
Although Sherlock joined the U.S. Airmail Service Feb. 12, 1920, he had flown 1,000 hours with the Canadian Royal Air Corps over France in 1917. The former Aetna insurance adjuster was living with his mother at East Orange’s 26 North 18th St., in 1920.
Mother Sherlock, two weeks later, wrote to 2nd Assistant Postmaster General Otto Prager in Washington, complaining that she had not received a note of condolence and that “everyone knows the approach to Heller Field is a death trap for aviators.”
Later, Robinson was flying Clarence Stapleton, Heller’s Clerk-in-Charge, when their plane went into a tailspin the pilot could not get out of and the plane crashed nose-first onto the Erie’s Greenwood Lake railroad tracks at 4:20 p.m. on April 11.
Stapleton, of 18 Fulton St., Newark, was 23. Robinson was taken to City Hospital with a broken leg and a suspected broken skull, among other injuries. The resident at 113 Broad St. survived.
The neighboring Forest Hill Golf Club (before they moved to Bloomfield) complained to the Forest Hill Improvement Association that day about pilots performing aerial stunts.
Post Office Department higher-ups relented to pilots’ demands and moved airmail service to South Plainfield’s Hadley Field by May 30, 1921. Newark City Commissioners, wanting the postal service contract back, created Newark Airport in 1928.
Essex County bought part of Heller Field to extend Branch Brook Park in 1931. The park’s northern area, also known as “The Four (Baseball) Diamonds,” was the site of temporary barracks during World War Two. One report added a temporary airplane strip then and there.
