Before MacArthur Boulevard (Vets Highway) hummed with hotels and rental car shuttles, before Southwest jets thundered low over Locust Avenue — Bohemia was a quiet Czech village of about 3,000 people, surrounded by sandy fields and pine barrens, where most everyone knew everyone else and the local language at the corner store was as likely to be Czech as English.
Then, in April 1942, four months after Pearl Harbor, the Town of Islip signed a contract with the federal government to build an airfield on town-owned land just to the north of the hamlet.
Nothing in Bohemia would ever be quite the same again.
A Wartime Decision
The land that became MacArthur Airport was, in its earliest days, simply scrub — the same kind of sandy, fire-scarred pine barrens our Czech founders had wrestled with eighty-seven years earlier. The Town owned a large tract of it, and in the panic-pace months after Pearl Harbor, the federal government needed somewhere on Long Island for the Civil Aeronautics Administration to drop three paved runways.
Construction moved at wartime speed. The airfield was built in just one year at a cost of $1.5 million, and originally consisted of three 5,000-foot runways. The CAA — predecessor to today’s FAA — funded the work through the wartime Development of Landing Areas for National Defense program.
The airfield was officially activated in May 1943. It was originally called, simply, Islip Airport.
But not for long. At the suggestion of a local elected official named Charles H. Duryea, the airfield was renamed in honor of General Douglas MacArthur, whose dramatic escape from the Philippines had captured the imagination of an entire nation at war.
By 1944, Lockheed Aircraft Corporation had built the airport’s first hangar. Through the 1950s, the Sperry Corporation conducted aerospace research on the grounds. After the war ended, the Town of Islip took over ownership of the airport from the U.S. Army Air Corps — the arrangement that, eighty years later, still defines the airport today. It remains owned and operated by the Town.
The Quiet Decade
For the first fifteen years, the airport felt distant from village life. Most Bohemians worked in cigar factories or button factories — the cigar trade had collapsed in the early 1930s, but the button industry was still humming at Math & Hrouda and B. Schwanda & Sons. The airfield to the north was a curiosity, not a neighbor.
The airport’s quiet years were broken by one tragedy. On April 4, 1955, a United Airlines Douglas DC-6 on a pilot test flight lost control shortly after takeoff and crashed, killing all three crew members on board. It remains the only fatality during a flight at the airport in its more than eighty-year history.
Five years later, in 1960, Allegheny Airlines became the first scheduled passenger carrier at Islip, flying Convair 440s to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The first commercial passengers walked across the tarmac and into a building that was, by today’s standards, more like a bus station than an airport.
Six years after that, in 1966, the General Douglas MacArthur Terminal opened. Bohemia residents who had grown up walking dirt paths through pine barrens were now neighbors to a working commercial airport.
The airport even made its film debut around this time: a scene from the 1970 comedy The Out-of-Towners, starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, was shot at MacArthur — the small terminal standing in for the Ohio airport from which Lemmon’s character departs for what becomes a disastrous trip to New York City.
A Hamlet Transformed
The combination of MacArthur Airport, the new Long Island Expressway, and the postwar suburban boom did to Bohemia what the cigar industry had done a century earlier — only faster and more permanently.
For a hundred years Bohemia had stayed small and largely Czech. At the village’s centennial in 1955, the population was still only around 3,000, and a high percentage of residents could still trace their families back to Vávra, Kratochvil, Koula, Nohowec, Jedlicka, Fiala, and the other founding names in the Union Cemetery.
By the time MacArthur began drawing legacy carriers in the 1970s — American Airlines was flying Boeing 727s nonstop to Chicago by 1971 — Bohemia had begun to change in ways the founders could never have imagined. The cigar workers’ cottages were giving way to ranch houses. New families with Italian, Irish, German, and Polish surnames moved in. The Czech language at Cervenka’s Market and the CSA Hall began to thin. By the time the airport handled its one millionth annual passenger in 1986 — a milestone that took 36 years of scheduled service to achieve — Bohemia was no longer a Czech village. It was a Long Island suburb that happened to have a Czech heart.
The Name That Almost Replaced Bohemia
Here is a piece of local history that surprises most people who hear it.
As the airport grew through the 1950s and 60s, some residents began suggesting Bohemia change its name. The argument was that “Bohemia” was too closely tied to one ethnic group and might discourage new families and businesses from settling here. Various replacements were floated: Sayville Heights, North Sayville, even Lidice (after the Czech village destroyed by the Nazis in 1942).
And one of the names suggested was MacArthur.
The idea would have erased the founders’ homeland from the map of Long Island in a single vote. It got serious enough to be debated — and then, thankfully, none of the proposals ever received enough public support to pass. Bohemia stayed Bohemia.
The Modern Airport at the Village’s Edge
Today, a portion of MacArthur Airport itself sits within the boundary of Bohemia. The airport covers 1,311 acres, with three active runways and two helipads. Its longest runway, 6/24, stretches 7,006 feet and is equipped at both ends with an Instrument Landing System. The airport now handles more than 1.5 million passengers a year, with Southwest, JetBlue, Frontier, Breeze, Avelo, and Cape Air all flying out of it. A New York Army National Guard battalion of Black Hawk helicopters has been headquartered there since 2006. The Suffolk County Police aviation unit operates from it around the clock.
The airport has racked up its share of “firsts” along the way. In November 2009, MacArthur became the only airport in the Tri-State region to offer free wireless internet throughout its entire terminal — including in the courtesy cell phone parking lot. In 2011, the FAA designated it an Official Metro Airport, formally grouping it with LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark in travel and informational searches for the New York region.
The economic footprint is substantial. According to a 2012 study by the New York State Department of Transportation, the airport supports roughly 6,000 jobs directly and indirectly, with an estimated $600 million annual economic impact on the surrounding area. Many of those jobs are held by Bohemia residents, just as many travelers passing through the terminal are visiting Bohemia families.
The airport is also currently in the middle of the biggest transformation in its history: a $3.3 billion Midway Crossing project that will see a brand-new terminal built on the north side of the property, directly connected to the Ronkonkoma LIRR station by pedestrian walkway. New York State alone has committed $150 million to the connection. The Town of Islip aims to select a final developer for the terminal by early 2026, with construction beginning in 2027.
For longtime Bohemia residents, it is a strange thing to look at. The pine barrens our great-grandfathers cleared by hand to make a Czech village have become the gateway, for more than a million travelers a year, into the New York metropolitan area.