Any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment.- Marshall McLuhan
It was my cousin’s last day in America–August 26, 1964–and he wanted to see the World’s Fair before flying back to London. My father drove us in his Buick to Flushing Meadow. The sky over Long Island was tempered blue and streaked with contrails. We bought tickets for General Motor’s Futurama exhibit and rode around a miniature landscape that showed what life would be like in the future. My cousin and I were disappointed. There was something hoaky about the whole fair and the so-called future seemed frankly shabby.After the fair, we drove south a few miles on the Van Wyck Expressway and reached the periphery of Idelwild, which is what my father still called the airport, although it had been renamed John F. Kennedy International the year before. We glided along freshly paved overpasses and beneath the signs bearing candy-colored numbers. The terminals were strung out like pavilions around the looping roadway and it felt as if we were back at the fair. There was the flashy stained glass entry to American Airlines, the flying saucer roof of Pan Am, and the endless glass facade of the arrivals building. Then we parked in front of the TWA terminal and walked inside.
I had seen photographs of the bird-like structure, but none had done it justice. The interior was a continuously flowing surface of cast concrete. There were no sharp corners, no right angles, no dull flat ceilings. The building was topsy-turvy–in some places the walls swooped down to become floor, while other parts curved above our heads like ocean waves about to break yet were somehow frozen in place. Between the vaults were gaping ellipses of glass through which you might see a tailfin or a passing cloud. I was only twelve and knew nothing about architecture, but the pavilions at the Worlds Fair seemed stodgy in comparison. This wasn’t pretending to be the future; this was the future. Those were real Boeing 707′s sitting on the tarmac.
The air was charged with anticipation. Pilots stepped through pools of milky light. Beautiful stewardesses trailed behind them wearing trim red outfits and perfectly straight stockings seams. The ambient lighting; the flirtatious smiles, the lipstick red carpet and uniforms; the cushioned benches and steel railings curving around the mezzanine–all conspired to work on the senses. Even the clock that hung from the ceiling had a sensually globular shape. We sat in an oversized conversation pit, beneath a panoramic screen of glass, and watched the service vehicles scoot between the planes. “This is unbelievably cool,” said my cousin in a hushed, almost reverential tone.
When his flight was announced,sell house fast he walked up the long umbilical departure tube, turned once to wave, like an astronaut, and then disappeared into the boarding satellite at the far end of the tube. There was an otherworldly, Twilight Zone quality to his moment of departure–as if my cousin were flying not to London but to Mars. Perhaps it was the recessed lighting or the curved walls that made for the slow-motion, spacy feeling. Perhaps it was the subtle rise of floor that made the boarding tube seem hyper-extended, much longer than it actually was. All I knew was that I didn’t want to leave just then. I wanted the moment to continue.
Departure tube at the TWA terminalIdelwild/Kennedy Airport, circa 1962Still, we headed back onto the Belt Parkway and drove east into the slanting afternoon light. I was unsettled for the rest of the drive: my cousin’s departure had been dream-like and elusive but, at the same time, very real. This was the essential modern moment–when technology seemed at one with human aspiration, before hijackings and air rage, before jumbo jets, before deregulation, dysfunctional baggage carousels and electro-magnetic scanners.
Over the next few years I flew frequently but never on TWA until I took a student year abroad. My flight had been booked on another airline, but it was canceled because of a bomb threat at JFK. It was Black September, 1970. There were bombs going off everywhere. The only available flight to Paris was on TWA and I was able to transfer my ticket, pleased to get the chance to return to anything goes diet that inspiring terminal again and walk up its mysterious boarding tube.
I pushed my way through a mob of angry German tourists–their flight had been canceled as well–and noticed how some of the openings had been boarded over with ugly sheets of plywood. The glacial sheets of glass were grimy. The too-bright lighting cast garish shadows on the undulating concrete walls that now looked cracked and dry–the texture of old chewing gum. The bright red carpeting was badly stained and curling at the edges. The stewardesses looked haggard.
My plane was almost empty except for a group of plucky women from Dallas who were heading to Paris on a shopping spree and weren’t going to let any terrorists ruin their fun. Drinks were free and when the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle, everyone stood and cheered. The next few flights I took across the Atlantic were on cheap charter planes and I learned to lower my expectations. Air travel had become an ordeal to be endured, not enjoyed. But I always wondered what had happened in that brief interval between the perfect airport moment of 1964 and the dissapointments of later years.
As air travelers, we remove ourselves from the experience by thinking about something else, but we are never altogether comfortable with the airport process. Instead of being thrilled–as I was at 12–we are more often than not horrified or bored by the reality. We check our bags and pass through security. We stand on the moving sidewalk and learn the status of our flight from a computer screen. We are both repelled and attracted at the same time. Some react with air rage, incensed by the impersonal nature of the setting. Others feel oddly light-headed, disembodied, or experience, as Joan Didion once wrote, a “certain weightlessness”. Most of us just want to reach our destination as quickly and safely as possible.
A sign at an airport construction site today reads: “Excuse our appearances. We are tearing down yesterday to make room for tomorrow.” But the idealized “tomorrow” never comes. The airport is at once a place, a system, a cultural artifact that brings us face to face with the advantages and frustrations of modernity. Its history has been a recurrent cycle of anticipation and disappointment; success and failure; innovation and obsolescence. This book traces that history through mutations of technology, design, and marketing–showing how the airport was gradually shaped into a new kind of human environment, while in turn, shaping the rest of the modern world.
AstrowayIn time, the free-standing terminals lost their architectural identity. The soaring aesthetic of the 1960s gave way to an ad-hoc style of hyper-extended breezeways: narrow prosthetic piers, walkways, flyways, jetways, all devised as schematic solutions to one inter-modal dilemma or another. Terminal floor plans began to mirror the complex geometries of air traffic itself–those aerial corridors, VOR radials and approach vectors that filled radar screens. Described as the “leanest structure in history,” intermittent fasting the finger, or variations thereof, became the panacea for all forms of airport chaos and sprouted recklessly like an architectonic form of Kudzu.
While fingers were always long and lean, they came in different guises. Some were Erector-set steel and glass, others were sheathed in concrete or ribbed aluminum and stretched between terminals and boarding satellites on the apron. There were straight ones at Kennedy and Love Field, Dallas, T-shaped fingers at Logan, sprocket-shaped fingers at San Francisco, and “split-finger” piers at Atlanta and Memphis. Fingers were also used to connect with ground transportation centers, or straddle highways to reach waffle-stacked parking structures, car rental agencies, and airport hotels. Indeed, the finger was the airport’s gift to architectural history and would become a solution outside the airport context, at shopping malls, multiplex cinemas, resort hotels, convention centers–places that demanded seamless enclosure and retail flexibility.
But many found these passageways unnerving and intimidating. John Updike described one airport as being a “long rats’-passage of corridors,” and the aero-phobic’s fear of flying was magnified by such elongated mutations. Some compared the finger to a cattle chute or a “hallway without end.” One writer described it as an “above-ground tunnel.” And there were below-ground versions too, like the 420-foot long sensory deprivation tubes at LAX that burrowed between terminal and satellite.
A sense of squeezed linearity was extended even further with new kinds of automated boarding ramps that provided direct connection between building and aircraft. There would be no more passengers running across rain-smeared tarmacs; no more geriatrics breaking hips on slippery steps; no more skirts blown up in sudden gusts of wind, but something was lost: the true sensation of transit as travelers crossed an open airfield and climbed aboard a plane. One could sense the horizontal sweep of the landscape,guitar scales and smell traces of fuel oil in the air. In the Jumbo era passengers became oblivious to the outside world, moving through concourses that were double-glazed and super-insulated to muffle the roar of jet engines. Thus conventional points of entry disappeared. Glass doors opened automatically at the command of seeing-eye photoelectric cells. Moving sidewalks, escalators, baggage conveyors whispered hydraulically. Departure lounges were shadowless holding tanks, saturated with muzak and fluorescent lighting. Video screens, first introduced in the 1970s, glowed dimly with arrival and departure times.
The experience was vacuum-sealed from beginning to end as if entering a tube that was open wide in front and then narrowed in diameter through concourse, finger and boarding ramp into the tubular body of the plane itself. At the destination end, the process would be repeated, but in reverse. One air terminal of the 1970s was described by its architect as being “a funnel leading from its parking garages and drop-off curb, through a linear concourse directly to its [boarding] pavilion.” There was no break, no sense of threshold or transition, certainly nothing gate-like in this funneling process and it all started to feel more like simulation than actual travel. “Encapsulation is a good part of the price paid for speed” lamented George Nelson.
As early as 1958, United Airlines had unveiled its “Aero-Gangplank,” a cantilevered ramp enclosed with stainless steel panels and propelled by a small motorized dolly. It could swivel around in a 180-degree arc and telescope out to meet the jets with a rubberized weather seal that conformed to the shape of the aircraft like the lips of a sucker fish.
International pictographs for airports, 1970
There was an ironic side-effect to these long appendages: While able to fly anywhere in the world in a matter of hours, jumbo jet passengers were now forced to walk longer distances on the ground. “[The fingers] are sheer hell for the traveler, as anyone knows who has hiked what seems miles along these noisy, confusing, crowded, hard-paved, and slippery corridors, baggage in hand and/or babe in arm, anxious to catch a connecting plane,” wrote critic Wolf Von Eckardt. By the end of the early 1970s, passengers were walking an average of 650 feet from parking lot to check-in. From check-in to plane was another 950 feet, which made for an average walk of 1,600 feet, five times the length of a football field. In this pre-aerobic era, that was more than some Americans walked in a week.
The marathon of airport trekking, however, was O’Hare which became known in the trade as “cardiac alley,” because in-transit passengers had to walk, in some cases, over a mile-and-a-half through the airport’s endless glass tentacles. “I was half way to Michigan before I got on the plane,” complained one weary travel writer. Internal pedestrian traffic at Atlanta/Hartsfield became so congested at one point that bright yellow traffic lines were painted along the floors to keep the crowds moving on the right side.
Moving sidewalks helped to accelerate the process, but they also added to the sense of encapsulation that now characterized the airport experience. To help passengers traverse the thousand-foot long passageways at Love Field/Dallas, engineers devised a system of moving sidewalks that were said to have been the first in airport history. The walkways moved in two directions at the granny-friendly speed of one-and-a-half miles per hour, but they seemed futuristic at the time. Rubes from outlying communities made pilgrimages to Love Field just to ride back and forth.
American Airlines announced that they would take the “walking out of flying” and at LAX, where passengers had to march 1,250 feet from check-in to plane, the company installed a moving sidewalk in the underground concourse that ran between terminal and boarding satellite. The automated rubber sidewalk was similar to the kind used at Love Field but it moved faster and could make the 420-foot trip in three minutes flat. It was officially called the “Astroway”– “astro” being the space-age prefix of the day. The public relations people worried that customers would have negative associations and be frightened away.
Conveyor belts were used in assembly line production for dumb, inanimate objects, not for people. So TV comedienne Lucille Ball was invited to inaugurate the device and show consumers that moving sidewalks were not only safe but fun. Everyone was supposed to remember the famous episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy worked at a chocolate factory and had to sort a stream of bon bons that rushed along the conveyor belt. She rode the Astroway cracking jokes to a group of reporters who ran along beside her. At first she was unsure of her balance on the moving rubber mat and clutched onto the hand rail, but then she gained confidence, raised her arms and cried to the reporters: “Look mom, no hands…”
Epilogue
In a sense, the trajectory that began in 1927 with Lindbergh’s landing at Bourget culminated when the first plane struck the north tower on September 11, 2001. Two icons of the machine age–airliner and skyscraper–came into collision and the tragic results were simulcast around the world. Television pundits described the ingenuity of the terrorists and how they had used unconventional, low-tech methods to operate “below the radar”–a commonly used phrase at the time. Considering the aeronautical associations of radar, it seemed an odd choice. Surely the terrorists were very much “on the radar.” Their assaults began within the fluorescent passageways of Logan, Dulles and Newark. There was no flag waving or fanfare: they were simply exploiting the shoddy banality of the airport system. Minicams at ATM machines and twenty-four-hour surveillance cameras recorded their movements before they boarded. X-ray machines scanned their belongings. A barely perceptible line was crossed and nineteen hijackers were waved past the security checkpoints.
The FAA tracked deviations in flight patterns. NORAD and the NSA plotted threat scenarios. Fighter jets scrambled and locked on to jetliners that were still in the air. On-board devices recorded cockpit conversations. Cell phones connected doomed passengers with loved ones on the ground. Network and amateur video cameras documented impact from a variety of angles. Still, the metaphor stuck–”below the radar”–implying an act that was, somehow, -pre-technological and therefore, unpreventable.
In response, airport security was tightened and President Bush appeared at O’Hare to tell Americans that it was safe to fly again. Television carried scenes of National Guardsmen marching through terminals dressed in camouflage fatigues and carrying M-16′s. “I noticed a big rifle while I was eating my Big Mac,” said one passenger at Newark Airport where ninety of the soldiers were stationed.
If it wasn’t already obvious, these images conveyed the inescapable truth: airports would play a front-line role in the coming global showdown. The newly formed Transportation Security Administration announced its Orwellian plans for CAPPS II (Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) to provide instant pre-flight profiles of passengers based on information drawn from FBI and CIA files, as well as bank and credit records. The relative sense of anonymity that travelers once took for granted was replaced by full electronic disclosure and a personalized “threat index” further eroding the precarious balance between security and insecurity. (Iris-scanning devices, the kind anticipated by science fiction, have already been installed.)
Once again we buy any house, the future beckons and the airport becomes a gauge of human tolerance as it continues to provide a testing ground for new technology–a place where the underlying contradictions of the modern age are surprisingly transparent. Roland Barthes wrote that architecture is, simultaneously, an “expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.” This has been particularly true at the airport where dream and function have been so consistently intertwined. It is still the threshold of change, as it was in Lindbergh’s day, but at this point in the twenty-first century, all vestiges of utopia have been lost.
