Travelers Surprised to Learn LaGuardia Had Infrastructure That Could Still Deteriorate Further
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
QUEENS, NY — A sinkhole discovered near a runway at LaGuardia Airport during a routine inspection last week prompted runway closures, cascading flight delays, and a reaction from New York City that can best be described as resigned recognition — the civic equivalent of a shrug that has been practiced so many times it has become a reflex.
The Discovery: Routine Inspection Finds Non-Routine Problem
Ground crews performing a routine inspection at LaGuardia discovered the sinkhole during what airport officials described as standard monitoring procedures, which is the sentence that raises more questions than it answers: if the inspection is routine and the monitoring is standard, at what point does a sinkhole move from “developing” to “discovered,” and how long was it developing while the routine monitoring was occurring on its routine schedule?
These questions, while reasonable, were not the questions asked by the travelers standing in Terminal B watching the departures board fill with delay notifications as the Memorial Day holiday weekend traffic backed up behind the runway closure. The questions asked in Terminal B were of a different character and a more colorful vocabulary.
LaGuardia, which was famously described by former Vice President Joe Biden as resembling a third-world airport — a comparison that Biden subsequently walked back under diplomatic pressure and that LaGuardia has spent considerable renovation budget addressing — has been undergoing a $8 billion renovation project that began in 2016 and has been, by most accounts, genuinely improving the terminal experience while leaving the underlying infrastructure in the complex condition of airports that were built on fill land adjacent to bodies of water in the mid-20th century.
The New York Airport Hierarchy of Suffering
New York City has three major airports serving its metropolitan area, each offering its own distinct form of travel stress. JFK is large, international, occasionally magnificent, and connected to the subway by a train that requires two connections and treats international travel as a character-building exercise. Newark is technically in New Jersey, which New Yorkers acknowledge only when doing so supports an argument. LaGuardia is the domestic airport, the closest to Manhattan, the smallest, and the one that has most consistently embodied the experience of infrastructure that has outgrown its design without being given the resources to keep pace.
The sinkhole is, in a sense, a metaphor that LaGuardia did not need, since it had already generated sufficient metaphorical content from its existing conditions. But metaphors, like sinkholes, do not wait for convenient timing.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates LaGuardia, has overseen a renovation that has genuinely transformed the terminal experience: the new Terminal B, in particular, has received architectural recognition and provides a passenger experience that Biden would not recognize from his famous quote. The underlying airfield, however, is governed by different engineering timelines and different budget allocations, and fill land adjacent to Flushing Bay has its own agenda that renovation schedules cannot entirely predict.
The Holiday Weekend Timing: A Classic
The sinkhole made its public debut on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, which is the busiest travel period of the early summer and the moment at which any airport delay produces its maximum possible human misery per hour. This timing was not deliberate — sinkholes do not consult holiday calendars — but it achieved the kind of maximum impact that would require considerable planning to replicate intentionally.
Travelers who had planned Memorial Day getaways from LaGuardia joined the long and distinguished tradition of New Yorkers whose travel plans have been modified by infrastructure they did not design, maintain, or control but are nonetheless affected by with maximum efficiency. New York City produces this experience across multiple transportation modes and has done so consistently enough that its residents have developed philosophical adaptations including: elaborate backup plans, departure times padded by factors that would seem paranoid in other cities, and a practiced ability to be furious and resigned simultaneously.
More LaGuardia dispatches, NYC airport satire, and Memorial Day travel misery: Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Related New York humor: Waterford Whispers News and The Daily Mash.
LaGuardia’s Renovation and What It Has and Hasn’t Fixed
The $8 billion LaGuardia renovation project, which was announced with considerable fanfare about transforming one of America’s most-criticized airports into a facility worthy of a great city, has genuinely improved the passenger terminal experience. The new Terminal B is a real architectural achievement. The retail and dining has improved. The signage is clearer. The bathrooms are better. These are not small things. They are the visible, experiential layer of an airport that passengers interact with directly. What the renovation did not address — because it was not designed to address — is the airfield infrastructure underneath and around the terminals: the runways, the taxiways, the ground conditions on the filled land adjacent to Flushing Bay where the airport has sat since 1939. Fill land subsides. It shifts. It develops, occasionally, voids beneath paved surfaces that present as sinkholes when discovered and as delays when they force runway closures. The discovery of the Memorial Day sinkhole is not a failure of the renovation. It is a reminder that an airport is more than its terminals, and that the most impressive terminal in the country sits on ground that has its own agenda.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/