John F. Kennedy International Airport is one of New York City's most successful and influential redevelopment projects. Built and defined by outsize personalities--Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, famed urban planner Robert Moses, and Port Authority Executive Director Austin Tobin among them--JFK was fantastically expensive and unprecedented in its scale. By the late 1940s, once-polluted marshlands had become home to one of the world's busiest and most...