Pilots flying into Washington Airport between 1927 and 1941 had three obstacles to dodge on the way down. To the northeast stood Arlington Beach, an amusement park whose roller coaster and Ferris wheel reached high enough to clip a careless approach. To the east, an open landfill burned continuously, sending smoke across the field on any north wind and a notorious stench across the Potomac into Washington. To the south, the unpaved runways - oiled earth, not asphalt - turned to mud in spring and dust in summer. The High Bridge to Washington, with its overhead trolley wires, crossed the river immediately north of the field. The Mount Vernon Memorial Highway ran along the western boundary. The airport was small, dangerous, and successful enough to become the second commercial airfield serving the nation's capital. It existed where the Pentagon's south parking lot now sits.
The first Washington airport was Hoover Field, a private airfield built in 1925 just south of the District line in Arlington, Virginia. It was named for Herbert Hoover - then Secretary of Commerce, not yet president - and was operated by a small group of investors as a base for sightseeing flights and the developing airmail service. Hoover Field was too small for the commercial passenger flights then beginning to emerge. In late 1927, Robert E. Funkhouser, the Lockheed test pilot Herbert 'Hub' Fahy, and several other investors built Washington Airport literally across Military Road from Hoover Field. The new field was three times the size of Hoover Field, and the founders intended it as a base for Seaboard Airways, the airline they incorporated in February 1928. The two airports operated as separate, competing facilities for six years - effectively running shared takeoff and landing patterns, since they were across a single road from each other on the marshy ground between Memorial Bridge and the High Bridge.
Both airports had the same essential problems. The runways were unpaved. Crosswinds funneled down the Potomac at takeoff height. The High Bridge's trolley wires made northern approaches dangerous. Most critically, the city of Arlington's municipal landfill sat immediately east of the field, and the trash was on fire - chronically, deliberately, as a method of waste disposal that the county did not shut down until 1932 (and then only at the landfill next to Hoover Field, not the one next to Washington Airport). Pilots flying into the field with a north or east wind found their landings obscured by drifting smoke. The smell, Washington newspapers complained at the time, drifted across the river and into Foggy Bottom. The amusement park to the northeast added its own complications. Arlington Beach featured a Ferris wheel and roller coasters that reached high enough to require pilots to thread between them on certain approaches. The amusement park was finally torn down in 1929 and its land absorbed into Washington Airport's expansion.
Washington Airport grew. In April 1928, the field was enlarged by tens of thousands of cubic yards of fill dirt excavated during the construction of the Federal Triangle complex in downtown Washington. The Potomac shoreline was reshaped to accommodate the additional acreage. By 1930 the field had grown to 97.31 acres. In March 1930, President Herbert Hoover - now the namesake of the airport across the road, where there were also discussions of expansion - proposed that the federal government lend the District government 2.5 million dollars to take over both Hoover Field and Washington Airport, fill in the Boundary Channel between the Virginia shore and Columbia Island, and create a single municipal airport that would be a model for the nation. The proposal went nowhere. In August 1930, Washington Airport announced it would begin ten flights a day between Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. By 1932 the federal night airmail flight had been transferred from Bolling Field to Washington Airport, a measure of how much the field had improved despite continuing problems with the landfill, the bridge, and the runway surfaces.
In 1933 the Ludington brothers - Nicholas S. and Charles Townsend Ludington, Pennsylvania aviation investors who had just sold their successful Ludington Airlines (where Amelia Earhart had served as vice president) to Eastern Air Transport - bought Hoover Field at auction in July. The same week, Washington Airport was put up for auction by Federal Aviation Corporation, which had been unable to make its mortgage payments. The Ludingtons quietly bought Washington Airport too through a shell company called National Airport Corporation. With both fields under common ownership for the first time, they merged on August 2, 1933, as Washington-Hoover Airport. The combined facility lasted eight more years. Washington National Airport - built on landfill at Gravelly Point south of the merged airfield - opened on June 16, 1941, and the commercial traffic immediately moved south. Washington-Hoover continued as a private field for small aircraft until September 16, 1941, when the U.S. Department of War purchased the entire site for one million dollars. The Pentagon was built there, with construction beginning on the same site, on the same ground that had carried airplanes for sixteen years.
Nothing of Washington Airport survives. The field has been buried under Pentagon south parking lots, Metrobus bays, and the Interstate 395 ramps that handle traffic between Virginia and the Fourteenth Street Bridge. The original runway alignment, however, can be traced by looking at the orientation of the Pentagon's outer wall sections relative to the Potomac. The terminal building was at what is now the intersection of Eads Street and the Pentagon's south access road. Arlington Beach's location is now occupied by the southern apron of the Pentagon parking. The burning dump's location is now under I-395 ramp 8. Across the river, the Federal Triangle - whose excavation dirt extended the airport's shoreline into the Potomac - still stands. The pattern of takeoffs over the Capitol that gave both Hoover Field and Washington Airport their characteristic accident statistics has been moved one mile south, where DCA's pilots now fly the modern version of the same approach. The ground itself has been completely repurposed. The story it carries has not.
Washington Airport's former site is now buried beneath the south parking lots of The Pentagon, centered near 38.8704 degrees N, 77.0561 degrees W on the Virginia shore of the Potomac just south of the Memorial Bridge. From the air the historical airfield outline is invisible; what's visible is the Pentagon itself - the world's largest office building - with its parking lots filling what was once airport mudflats. Best viewed at 1,500 to 3,000 feet AGL; the entire site lies within the Washington FRZ. The modern Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (KDCA) is just 1 nm south. Other nearest airports are College Park (KCGS) 10 nm northeast and Washington Dulles (KIAD) 20 nm west.