7.21.22 - Wait, La Guardia Is Nice Now? Inside New York’s $25 Billion Airport Overhaul
' Complaining about the sorry state of New York City’s airports has become a national pastime.
For decades, travelers have exchanged tales of indignities: rats in the terminals, pigeon droppings, leaky ceilings, broken escalators, temporary toilets. Even the top official who oversees the airports has unpleasant memories of using them.
“I vividly remember the state that La Guardia was in, with tarps hanging down to catch leaks,” said Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates La Guardia and John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, as well as Newark Liberty International in New Jersey. “Certainly, La Guardia, parts of Newark and parts of J.F.K. were just disgraces.”
Now, after years of neglect and underinvestment, the Port Authority is revamping all three of its major airports at a cost of more than $25 billion. If all goes according to plan, the New York metropolitan area could have three of the most modern airports in the country by 2030.
Some travelers have already started noticing the changes. Jeff Mauro, a cookbook author and television personality from Chicago, recalled the old La Guardia this spring as he sat inside one of its new terminals.
“It was like a bus station, let’s not lie,” Mr. Mauro said. “I don’t long for the water-bottle leak collection system they had in baggage claim.”
Despite a long line to clear security, Mr. Mauro said he was impressed with the new terminal. “It’s the first time I’ve been in a domestic airport that reminded me of an Asian-style airport.”
There was a time when New York City’s airports were considered modern marvels.
In the 1940s, New Yorkers would visit the observation deck at La Guardia Airport just to watch planes take off and land, including the occasional Clipper, a “flying boat” operated by Pan American Airways. Seaplane passengers would arrive at Marine Air Terminal, a landmark of Art Deco architecture still in use today.
La Guardia was named for Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor who was so annoyed at having to land in New Jersey that he demanded the city develop an airport of its own. Shortly before Mr. La Guardia died, the city turned operational control over to the Port Authority through a lease that has been extended over the decades.
La Guardia became so popular that the Port Authority had to shift all international and coast-to-coast flights across Queens to New York International Airport, which was known as Idlewild until it was renamed for President Kennedy in 1963.
New terminals were added to La Guardia to accommodate the growing demand for travel to and from the city. But over the last 25 years, the Port Authority has allowed them to deteriorate, and La Guardia has developed a reputation for dysfunction. Most famously, in 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden compared landing at La Guardia to arriving in “some third-world country.”
Mitchell L. Moss, a professor at New York University, said the Port Authority’s neglect can be traced back decades, but the fate of the airports was cast on Sept. 11, when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and killed the agency’s executive director, Neil D. Levin.
The Port Authority, jointly controlled by the governors of New York and New Jersey, owned and operated the World Trade Center and became “consumed with rebuilding downtown,” Mr. Moss said. “They were seriously wounded organizationally, and it took them a decade to resolve that.”
Thomas K. Wright, the chief executive of the Regional Plan Association, a research group focused on infrastructure in and around the city, said “a lot of public space was terrible” in the 1970s and 1980s, including the subways and Times Square. Then, he said, “we started to improve the public realm dramatically, and suddenly the airports were an outlier and were in much worse conditions.”
In the early 2000s, the long, costly campaign to rebuild the World Trade Center and replace the transit hub beneath it underscored the hazards of the Port Authority’s owning such a broad array of assets. Besides running the region’s three major airports, the agency operates its seaports, a commuter rail line and several bridges and tunnels that connect New York City and New Jersey.
Before the pandemic, the Port Authority took in more than $5 billion annually. How it spent that money was a puzzle of priorities, and in some years, especially in the decade after Sept. 11, airports took a back seat. In 2011 and 2012, the agency invested $4.8 billion on reconstructing the World Trade Center; it spent less than $600 million on its airports.
The disproportionate funding coincided with waning enthusiasm for modern air travel, an experience that, by the end of the 20th century, had turned into more of an irksome chore than a luxurious jaunt. The glamour of catching a Pan Am flight from a modern, spacious airport like Kennedy International had been reduced to nostalgia. '