The aircraft that brought food to blockaded Berlin thus flew into a building with a complicated identity. For West Berliners of that era, Tempelhof was the airport they knew; most of them had not thought of it primarily in architectural-political terms. For American service personnel arriving from the United States, the scale and style of the building were striking in ways that the German workers who had built it and used it every day might not have registered.
Halvorsen’s return as base commander from 1970 to 1972 placed him in authority over this facility for two years. His reflections on the period were focused primarily on the people he worked with and the city he found himself back in, not on the building’s architectural politics. But the layers of history embedded in the place where he had broken two sticks of gum in 1948 were there, whether explicitly acknowledged or not.
Tempelhof closed as an active airport in 2008. The subsequent conversion of the runway area to a public park, Tempelhofer Feld, gave the space a new life. Berliners who cycle or fly kites or hold barbecues on the former runway are doing so on the same surface where C-54s descended at minute intervals through the fall and winter of 1948 and 1949. The building remains, its architectural significance contentious but its historical significance undeniable. The names on the Airlift Memorial at its edge are still there: 78 people who died so that a city could continue to be supplied from the air.