Terminal Memories

March 24, 2025

APROPOS OF nothing, aside from the nagging frustrations of getting older, it dawns on me that, at one point or another during the course of my beleaguered career, I’ve worked at three of commercial aviation’s most historically significant airline terminals.

And I don’t mean just passing through. I was based in these buildings.

In the early and mid-2000s I worked New York’s JFK Airport out of what, at the time, was known ignominiously as “terminal 3.” In its heydays, though, this was the Worldport, the home hub of Pan American World Airways.

The Worldport was never beautiful, architecturally, but it was one the most distinctive airport buildings ever constructed — a Jet Age fantasy topped with a dramatic elliptical rooftop that loomed over JFK like a giant flying saucer. Kings and queens, sheiks and ambassadors, statesmen and spies all had walked its corridors. And me, of course, headed off to Paris or Sao Paulo or Dakar.

Even before I worked at the Worldport, I more or less knew my way around it, having flown Pan Am several times as a kid. My first-ever visit had been in the spring of 1979, when I was in seventh grade. Me and a friend embarked on a secret trip to JFK — a sort of junior pilot’s planespotting pilgrimage, in which we’d spent the entire Saturday afternoon up on roof, watching and photographing the jets. We’d used our birthday money to buy round-trip tickets from Boston. We brought packed lunches, binoculars, and an old Kodak 110 camera. Our parents had no idea.

By the 2000s, long after Pan Am’s glory days, it was dilapidated and falling to pieces — a grimy warren of dimly lit passageways and peeling paint. Strategically placed buckets and sheets of canvas collected the rainwater that poured through ceiling cracks. The great flying saucer was still there, but its crumbling masonry evoked little beyond a crying need to be torn down.

Which, in 2013, it was…

Also in the early 2000s, prior to my time in terminal 3, I operated some flights from the Marine Air Terminal over at La Guardia.

The M.A.T. is William Delano’s Art Deco jewel in La Guardia’s southwest corner, right on the water. Opened in 1940, it was originally the embarkation point for Pan Am’s flying boats. Inside the rotunda is the famous “Flight” painting by James Brooks.

Unlike terminal 3, it remains standing, kept from destruction by the good sense of Gotham preservationists. The building’s newer extension is used today by Spirit Airlines, which is maybe an example of the worst kind of irony. Most passengers pass through the newer section without ever seeing the original atrium or the Brooks mural, but you can detour through if you want.

Commissioned in 1952, the mural traces the history of aviation from mythical to (then) modern, Icarus to Pan Am Clipper. The style is a less-than-shy nod at Socialist realism, and at the height of ’50s McCarthyism, in a controversy not unlike the one surrounding Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center, it was obliterated with gray paint. Not until 1977 was it restored.

There’s even a cozy garden and picnic spot just outside, to the right of the gleaming Art Deco doors as you face them, where you can relax beneath the blue and gold frieze of flying fish.

And, swinging back to JFK, in 1996 I flew out of Eero Saarinen’s landmark TWA terminal.

This is the most famous of the three terminals, and probably the only one that deserves to be called iconic (fewer words are more overused these days, but here’s one time it belongs).

“All one thing,” is how Saarinen, a Finn whose other projects included the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the terminal at Washington-Dulles, once said of it. It’s a fluid, unified sculpture of a space, at once futuristic and organic; a carved-out atrium reminiscent of the caves of Turkish Cappadocia, overhung by three cantilevered ceilings that rise from a central spine like huge wings.

In 1996, though, when I was working there as a captain for TWA Express, it had long since fallen into disrepair. Clutches of sparrows lived in the rafters, I remember, bouncing across the floors in a hunt for crumbs. The walls were discolored and the carpeting gave off an ammonia stink. It was a wretched place in swift need of a wrecking ball.

What happened, instead, was a miraculous reinvention. After sitting empty for several years, it was turned it into a hotel. Or, more accurately, it was renovated and a hotel was added on.

The TWA terminal is now the TWA Hotel, with the original section serving as a check-in lobby and, though it’s not described as such, a museum. It’s been kitch-ified a touch, but overall the preservation efforts were beautifully executed. If you can afford the rates, come stay the night. If you can’t, stop in and wander around for an hour.

So there it is. My New York City “terminal triangle.”

I have six more years before the government makes me hang up my wings. These are things I think about.

I think, too, about how our airports have changed — devolved, maybe, is the better word — in the decades since Eero Saarinen or the Marine Air Terminal. With only scattered exceptions, they’ve become unspeakably generic, lacking of any real architectural vision or grandeur.

Right next to the TWA terminal at JFK used to stand the National Airlines “Sundrome,” a glass-and-steel beauty designed by I.M. Pei. Think about it: Saarinen and Pei, at the same airport, a few hundred feet from each other. The Sundrome was demolished about ten years ago, and on that hallowed ground today sits the hulking nothingness of jetBlue’s “terminal 5.”

Functionality and efficiency are now the only measure. Like so much of the air travel experience, it ain’t what it used to be.

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