Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields [airfields-freeman.com] collects America's half-forgotten strips and reconstructs each one's history from old aeronautical charts, topographic maps, aerial photographs, and tips from readers who flew or lived nearby. Every airfield gets its own dated, illustrated entry showing how it appeared, changed, and slipped into history.
There are a rather amazing 2,868 airfields in all, from naval air stations to cropduster strips mowed out of pasture. USGS topo maps might show one decade after decade until the runway vanishes, replaced by a subdivision, or a golf course, or nothing at all; people now living on these sites usually have no idea what lies beneath them.
Take the Kipapa Field entry on Oahu, for example. Kipapa means "paving the way" in Hawaiian, and the field, reportedly cut straight out of a sugarcane patch, hosted WWII squadrons before becoming a housing development. As a resident of Pittsburgh, I had to see if McKeesport's long-gone airport (one part of the first airmail routes to the metro area) was listed. According to the entry, it drew an enormous crowd when Lindbergh landed in 1927. It was sold to Westinghouse and gone by the 1950s, replaced the Atomic Power Laboratory, still there.
Alaksa's coastal strips prove a different kind of loss: erosion and climate change. Though Newtok, mapped above, is still there. I note with sadness that it doesn't have my current favorite abandoned and little-known airstrip, Stampede Airport.
Paul Freeman has run the site since the 20th century and its plain, OpenOffice-generated HTML has aged into something close to a marvel: fast, legible, and fully accessible in an era of bloated front-end design.
See also Abandoned Rails (same thing, but train sidings and branch lines), Kevin Walsh's Forgotten New York (cities within cities) and Subterranea Britannica (mines, tunnels, bunkers and other underground delights.)
