system continuing to lower Manhattan. In one well-publicized incident in November 1933, shortly before La Guardia assumed the New York City mayor's office, he refused to get off a plane at Newark Airport because his ticket said that the flight went to New York, and the mayor-elect demanded that the plane be flown to Bennett Field. In 1934, officials requested that the Post Office Department to compare the merits of Newark Airport and Floyd Bennett Field, as they believed that the latter was better equipped. In letters to Postmaster General James Farley, U.S. Representatives from Brooklyn extolled the new facilities at Bennett Field and compared them to the inadequate facilities at Newark Airport. However, the representatives failed to note that the Postal Service had chosen Newark Airport because it was built first. In 1935, La Guardia succeeded in convincing the Post Office Department to review the benefits and drawbacks of Floyd Bennett Field. The department's review of the airport consisted mainly of drawbacks: there was no direct highway or train route from Bennett Field to Manhattan, but there were such links between Newark and Manhattan. La Guardia suggested that the New York City Subway be extended to Bennett Field in order to resolve this problem. In August 1935 the department decided to keep the metropolitan area's airline terminal at Newark. However, La Guardia persisted in lobbying for Floyd Bennett Field. He had the New York City Police Department calculate how long it would take, in clear weather, to go from Penn Station to each airport and then back to Penn Station. The NYPD found that it only took 24 minutes to get to or from Newark, but that the same trip to Floyd Bennett Field took 38 minutes. The New York Times determined that it would take five to ten minutes more to go from Midtown Manhattan to Bennett Field than to Newark. After learning of this evidence, La Guardia then petitioned to make Floyd Bennett Field a suitable alternative to the Newark airmail terminal. To support his argument, La Guardia cited several flights that had been diverted to Bennett Field. In December 1935, a meeting was held at the Post Office Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., concerning Floyd Bennett Field's suitability as an airmail terminal. Grover Whalen, chairman of La Guardia's Committee on Airport Development, argued that the city had an "inalienable right" to appear on maps of the