Want to visit 1974? Then fly into the one part of Chicago's O'Hare Airport that hasn't doesn't seem to have changed since then. That's what I did on Saturday, May 7 when my US Airways flight from Philadelphia pulled up to a gate in the F Concourse.
Chicago is one of those rare places where two airlines maintain major hubs. United (the larger of the two) is based in Terminal 1, while American calls Terminal 3 home. Decades of competition have prompted both carriers to transform their original off-the-shelf facilities into places of distinction. United's Helmut Jahn-designed Terminal One, though tarnished by all sorts of creeping crud installed since it opened in the late 1980s, remains one of the most ambitious and successful in the nation, I think.
And international airlines use a still-new Terminal 5, a glittering showcase that I don't think is entirely successful by virtue of the way it squats on the field like an elongated quonset hut (how does that inspire flight?), but it's still a worthy attempt for Chicago to have a world-class gateway for flights from all over: Europe, Asia, South America, you name it.
So that leaves old Terminal 2, with its E and F concourses, as the place where all the “other airlines” go at O'Hare: Delta, USAirways, Air Canada, as well as Continental and Northwest before they were merged into United and Delta, respectively. With no major tenant demanding anything other than gate space, presumably, the terminal remains substantially as it was configured when it opened in the 1960s for the then-new jet age: modern, efficient, yes, but also boring and uninspired. It has virtually nothing to do with the idea that you're in an airport.
Really. Step off a plane, and your first taste of Chicago is of a shopping mall in the 1970s. Low ceilings and dull plain corridors leading you to the blockish terminal building, itself sheathed entirely in glass! (How daring! For 1966!) Details are substandard, and bespeak deferred maintenance: in some gate areas, rows of seats sported ripped upholstery, and they looked like they'd been like that for a long time.
I'll give them a few nice grace notes. The floor had a strange design based on intersection lines in which occasionally a triangle was colored blue, and most gate areas I saw were not imprisoned by the oh-so-cool horizontal windows that seem to be the rage in newer airport construction, and which I detest. And the original “Y” design of the concourses, in which E and F meet and form a kind of triangle junction, does reduce the distance between gates, though virtually no connection flights are run here by non-hub airlines.
The one truly spectacular thing was the entrance area to the gates. Concourse E has long been a kind of “spillover” area for United flights (all their dedicated gates in C and B aren't enough), and with the Continental merger it looks as if United is set to completely take over E. At some point United took the Helmut Jahn forms of Terminal One next door (all based on Victorian railroad station architecture, an inspired choice), and grafted them onto a small but surprisingly soaring vestibule connecting the terminal building with the concourses.
The result is that for just a moment, departing travelers might possibly feel that they're about to experience something out of the ordinary, and United connecting passengers will feel somewhat confident that they're in the right place by virtue of the design similarity. Alas, it does not extend to the gate areas or anywhere else, and in that sense it's a big tease. But while you're there, it's heartening, like the first few notes of a symphony, though the rest of it remains unplayed.
The check-in area of Terminal 2 has the feel of a big rectangular sarcophagus—not the most effective way to get anyone excited about the miracle of flight. The architecture reminds me of nothing so much as what I saw on a visit to Lenin's Tomb in Red Square many years ago. All that's missing is a waxy body on display somewhere. I didn't stick around long, so I may have missed it.
No comments:
Post a Comment