nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
As an occasional traveler, I've been pleased to witness this transformation first-hand.
Column by David Von Drehle:
For years, LaGuardia Airport in New York was Exhibit A of American decline. Millions of passengers each year encountered its dingy corridors, leaking ceilings, worn carpets and dangling wires. Lazy pundits and glib politicians compared LaGuardia in its throes with the gleaming new airports of a rising China and concluded that our best days were behind us.
I won’t live to see it, but, 75 years from now, I predict those Chinese gems might be showing some age, as LaGuardia did at 75. For now, the question to ask is whether any nation can match the miracle of architecture, engineering, logistics and visionary audacity that is LaGuardia today.
An ambitious public-private partnership has transformed America’s worst-rated major airport into the traveling public’s top choice. According to an annual survey by the Airports Council International, LaGuardia was passenger favorite among high-traffic facilities for the second straight year, consistent with the No. 1 ranking conferred by the latest Forbes Travel Guide.
From worst to best is not the pattern of a failing culture. The stunning modernization of LaGuardia was a painful and expensive process, costing more than $8 billion across years of inconvenience. But the project was grand almost beyond comprehension: creating a state-of-the-art facility on top of the existing ruin, constrained by the same tiny piece of real estate — without losing a day of traffic through one of the nation’s most vital transportation hubs.
In a 2024 article in Architectural Record, Peter Ruggiero, design principal at the project’s lead firm, HOK, offered this simile to suggest the challenge: “It was a bit like driving down the highway at 60 miles per hour, getting a flat, and having to change the tire without being able to stop the car.”
Which would indeed be miraculous, but modernizing LaGuardia is no mere tire change. The old airport was Stygian, festooned with yellow police tape and smelling of hell, where angry travelers squatted on their roller bags for want of places to sit through perpetual flight delays. In its place are new terminals bathed in light through vast windows, where fountains dance amid works of art, and interesting shops and restaurants beckon to happy customers.
The airport serves as an unintended answer to a riveting podcast produced in 2023 by the Boston public-radio station WGBH. Host Ian Coss unpacked the story of the Big Dig, an epic feat of public will and civil engineering that remade a great American city by burying the eyesore highway that slashed through its heart. Tunneling under a metropolis while life bustled overhead required audacity worthy of history’s greatest builders. Coss worried that no such ambition would ever be possible again.
He should have considered LaGuardia, a similarly bold — and similarly carped-about — project, commenced in 2016, just a few years after the completion of the Boston rebuild, and substantially done by 2022. Here, the challenge was building over, not under. The airport’s tiny footprint, on a landfilled marsh in Queens, allowed no room for reconfiguration. The new had to rise atop the old.
So, the parking garage was moved to accommodate a new main hall as airy and convenient as the old one was grim and gray. New departure gates rose in two buildings on the runway side of the existing terminal. These new buildings were connected by massive bridges that spanned the old terminal, allowing it to keep plugging along down below.
When work finally reached the point that the old terminal could be demolished, planners used the cleared space to design a more efficient flow of taxiing aircraft, thus unsnarling the jams that once made LaGuardia synonymous with delays.
The finished product is a bit of a Cinderella story for the workaday airport that was conceived in 1929, opened for business in 1939, and expanded in 1964 in time for the nearby world’s fair. LaGuardia was the dowdy stepsister of glamorous John F. Kennedy International Airport, the nearby hub whose Eero Saarinen swoops and curves epitomized the swinging ’60s. Once again, the cutting edge is in New York, with LaGuardia’s vast windows as the glass slipper.
To have aging infrastructure, a nation must have infrastructure to begin with. China looks shiny new because it is: from Third World to first in a scant two generations. That’s a stirring story in the history of human development — but it’s not an indictment of the United States.
LaGuardia, the Big Dig and other reboots on smaller scales across the country speak to America’s enduring ambition, engineering prowess and unflagging faith in the future. They come from the side of the national personality whose motto is “get ’er done,” whose lifeblood is renewal, and whose banner is emblazoned: You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Column by David Von Drehle:
For years, LaGuardia Airport in New York was Exhibit A of American decline. Millions of passengers each year encountered its dingy corridors, leaking ceilings, worn carpets and dangling wires. Lazy pundits and glib politicians compared LaGuardia in its throes with the gleaming new airports of a rising China and concluded that our best days were behind us.
I won’t live to see it, but, 75 years from now, I predict those Chinese gems might be showing some age, as LaGuardia did at 75. For now, the question to ask is whether any nation can match the miracle of architecture, engineering, logistics and visionary audacity that is LaGuardia today.
An ambitious public-private partnership has transformed America’s worst-rated major airport into the traveling public’s top choice. According to an annual survey by the Airports Council International, LaGuardia was passenger favorite among high-traffic facilities for the second straight year, consistent with the No. 1 ranking conferred by the latest Forbes Travel Guide.
From worst to best is not the pattern of a failing culture. The stunning modernization of LaGuardia was a painful and expensive process, costing more than $8 billion across years of inconvenience. But the project was grand almost beyond comprehension: creating a state-of-the-art facility on top of the existing ruin, constrained by the same tiny piece of real estate — without losing a day of traffic through one of the nation’s most vital transportation hubs.
In a 2024 article in Architectural Record, Peter Ruggiero, design principal at the project’s lead firm, HOK, offered this simile to suggest the challenge: “It was a bit like driving down the highway at 60 miles per hour, getting a flat, and having to change the tire without being able to stop the car.”
Which would indeed be miraculous, but modernizing LaGuardia is no mere tire change. The old airport was Stygian, festooned with yellow police tape and smelling of hell, where angry travelers squatted on their roller bags for want of places to sit through perpetual flight delays. In its place are new terminals bathed in light through vast windows, where fountains dance amid works of art, and interesting shops and restaurants beckon to happy customers.
The airport serves as an unintended answer to a riveting podcast produced in 2023 by the Boston public-radio station WGBH. Host Ian Coss unpacked the story of the Big Dig, an epic feat of public will and civil engineering that remade a great American city by burying the eyesore highway that slashed through its heart. Tunneling under a metropolis while life bustled overhead required audacity worthy of history’s greatest builders. Coss worried that no such ambition would ever be possible again.
He should have considered LaGuardia, a similarly bold — and similarly carped-about — project, commenced in 2016, just a few years after the completion of the Boston rebuild, and substantially done by 2022. Here, the challenge was building over, not under. The airport’s tiny footprint, on a landfilled marsh in Queens, allowed no room for reconfiguration. The new had to rise atop the old.
So, the parking garage was moved to accommodate a new main hall as airy and convenient as the old one was grim and gray. New departure gates rose in two buildings on the runway side of the existing terminal. These new buildings were connected by massive bridges that spanned the old terminal, allowing it to keep plugging along down below.
When work finally reached the point that the old terminal could be demolished, planners used the cleared space to design a more efficient flow of taxiing aircraft, thus unsnarling the jams that once made LaGuardia synonymous with delays.
The finished product is a bit of a Cinderella story for the workaday airport that was conceived in 1929, opened for business in 1939, and expanded in 1964 in time for the nearby world’s fair. LaGuardia was the dowdy stepsister of glamorous John F. Kennedy International Airport, the nearby hub whose Eero Saarinen swoops and curves epitomized the swinging ’60s. Once again, the cutting edge is in New York, with LaGuardia’s vast windows as the glass slipper.
To have aging infrastructure, a nation must have infrastructure to begin with. China looks shiny new because it is: from Third World to first in a scant two generations. That’s a stirring story in the history of human development — but it’s not an indictment of the United States.
LaGuardia, the Big Dig and other reboots on smaller scales across the country speak to America’s enduring ambition, engineering prowess and unflagging faith in the future. They come from the side of the national personality whose motto is “get ’er done,” whose lifeblood is renewal, and whose banner is emblazoned: You ain’t seen nothing yet.
