“All they have to do is add ‘international’ to the end of the name,” Neena Palmer says. “You’ve got LaGuardia. You’ve got JFK. No one needs to tell them they’re in New York.” “The state of Rhode Island is such a mess and I don’t think they should be advertising it."
WARWICK, R.I. — The Rhode Island Airport Corporation is trying to figure out if renaming T.F. Green Airport would be better for business.
Neena Palmer, Green’s grandniece, has an answer: No.
“All they have to do is add ‘international’ to the end of the name,” Palmer said from Texas. “You’ve got LaGuardia. You’ve got JFK. No one needs to tell them they’re in New York.”
“The state of Rhode Island is such a mess and I don’t think they should be advertising it,” she said. “I think that’s a lot of hubris.”
William Fischer, spokesman for the airport corporation, said the idea is being talked about internally, but not decided.
He said the impetus came from some of the new airlines that have opened up shop at the airport over the past year. As part of the internal review, airport officials had asked various interested parties their opinion on the idea, and that led to public discussion of the possible change.
“It’s premature to say it’s going to happen,” he said.
Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian said he was one of those approached. He said he wasn’t opposed to a name change on principle, but would want to hear the alternatives first.
“If it’s going to be ‘Providence International Airport,’ that would not sit well with the city,” he said.
Avedisian said he been told that some of the airlines at Green were concerned that some on-line airline ticket-selling websites, when a traveler types in Rhode Island as a destination, offer Logan Airport in Boston as the preferred arrival. Naming the airport after Rhode Island, Avedisian said he’d been told, would make make it more likely that those sites’ search engines would pick T. F. Green, under that new name.
Though Palmer said she disagreed with the idea of renaming the airport, she said she had no argument with how the airport is being run.
Traffic is up at the airport this year. Through October 2017, the most recent month posted on the corporation’s website, arriving and departing travelers counts were 3.2 million, 5.3 percent more than the same time last year. Cargo was even higher, with 24 million pounds loaded and unloaded, and 9.8 percent over the first 10 months of last year.
There is more than just a name to Green’s connection with the airport. Under Green’s gubernatorial administration what was then Hillsgrove Airport underwent an expansion in 1935 that transformed it from a closely mowed pasture into a modern airport. It was named for Gov. Theodore F. Green in 1938, a year after he left the governorship for the U.S. Senate, where he served until 1961.
According to the airport history on the Rhode Island Airport Corporation website, Green used federal Depression-era job project money to install concrete runways 3,000 feet long in alignments that are still in use today. A two-way radio station was built, light beacons for night flying were installed as well as a navigation radio beam, the radio equivalent of the light from a lighthouse, that pilots could use to find the airport.
Green was also an historic figure in the state’s political history. After two failed attempts, he won the governorship in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt wave of 1932. Working with new Democratic majorities in the state House and Senate, Green led what has become known as the Bloodless Revolution, in which the Democrats purged the state bureaucracy of Republicans and presided over the start of a Democratic Party dominance in state politics that has lasted 85 years.
“He broke the back of the crooked Republican Party,” Palmer said.
Palmer said changing the name from T. F. Green had come up before, in 1996, when the facility’s new terminal was named to honor Bruce Sundlun, another Rhode governor who had pushed for improvements at the airport.
Fischer said part of the corporation’s deliberations on a possible name change would be finding a way to still memorialize Green, his role with the airport and the state’s history.
“Any contemplation of a name change would involve some kind of recognition for T. F. Green,” Fischer said. “He had quite a life.”