BY LENORE SKENAZY
A recent New York Times’ description of LaGuardia Airport bore a certain resemblance to the End Times. As Patrick McGeehan reported on one particularly terrible, very bad, no good day last month:
“Harried travelers abandoned cars and navigated the clogged Grand Central Parkway — the main highway serving La Guardia — on foot with suitcases in tow. Such traffic debacles have become so common that seasoned fliers and travel bloggers have recommended avoiding La Guardia altogether, perhaps for years to come.”
This called to mind the evening I’d flown home earlier in the summer to find a line of perhaps 200–300 people waiting for a taxi. I whipped out my phone and videotaped it the way you’d video a funnel cloud, or a mudslide.
And those were people who weren’t going to miss a plane! Anyone trying to depart has been advised by the Transportation Security Administration to arrive at LaGuardia a minimum of 2 hours before takeoff. So, last week, I did.
For a 1 pm fight on American I got to the airport at 10:30 am via the amazingly efficient bus from the 74th St. and Roosevelt Ave. Station. To my shock, everything seemed efficient when I arrived, too. The check-in lines were vanishingly short, the lady at the bookstore delightfully chatty, and the security line pleasantly swift and groping-free. I felt I could almost hold onto a bottle of water, it was that sane. Cheerfully I entered Terminal C to look for gate C37 and saw the sign:
Gates C1–14.
Hmm…
“I just walked all the way to the end,” a lady told me as we meandered around before discovering a little desk where a harried employee was explaining that Terminal C is now in two different buildings at once, physics be damned.
To get to the parallel-universe C requires a shuttle bus, something that must throw off any travelers who allotted themselves just a few minutes to walk to their gate. And to get to the shuttle bus requires schlepping down a bunch of sad, service-entrance steps with your luggage or, in the case of one family I was watching, your luggage, you two babies, and your double stroller. No elevator, no offer of help. Welcome American Airlines passengers!
The shuttle bus winds its way past the New York of 1977: Piles of traffic barriers looming next to loading docks protected by the dingy plastic strips you see at the car wash. All it’s missing is a blackout.
“I’ve never seen an airport so messy,” Sravya Bandi, an IT analyst down from Montreal, told me.
But then you get off the bus, drag your luggage (and kids and double stroller) up three flights of stairs, and suddenly: Oz!
This terminal is gleaming! It’s more than respectable, it elegantly refutes the famous Joe Biden quote, “If I blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia Airport, you [would] think, ‘I must be in some third-world country.’ ”
None of the seats here are ripped. No weird brown stains are spreading across the ceiling. And there’s nary an Auntie Annie’s Pretzel to be gnawed.
Okay, the parking is impossible and “There is clearly not enough room to drop people off,” said Marie DeParis, a television marketing exec on her way to Florida. “But once you walk inside and get past security, it’s beautiful!”
The travelers I spoke to from Ghana, Ukraine, and even New Jersey marveled at the futuristic décor, including a restaurant so sleek one man wasn’t sure how to order.
“I kept trying to signal a waiter,” he said, “until someone explained, ‘No, you order using the iPad.’ ”
Bo Miller, a 42-year-old veteran from Charlotte, NC, said he found the prices futuristic, too.
“I just had a burger and the smallest ginger ale I ever had, for $21.”
But, he added, the burger was good.
Yes, there will be years of construction along with untold parking woes. There may still be those days like the one a traveler named Will recalled from his most recent LaGuardia trip; “We were 44th in line for takeoff.”
But for those of us traumatized by the old LaGuardia — the Airport of Despair — the new terminal hints of brighter days to come.
After some delays.
Lenore Skenazy is a keynote speaker, author and founder of the book and blog Free-Range Kids, and a contributor at Reason.com.
