In Philadelphia: Breakfast, anyone?

Switching planes in Philadelphia on our way from Manchester, N.H. to Chicago this morning. And what's the first thing we see upon arriving in the city of Brotherly Love?


And in case that doesn't whet your appetite, how about this?



How interesting for us to pass through Philadelphia during the Great Plate Shortage of 2011!

I thought the purpose of food displays was to attract people, but I think I get what's going on here. This is actually a brilliant crowd management device to keep customers at bay, thus preventing long lines from forming in the concourse's narrow corridor and keeping passengers from missing tight connections. My mistake!

Actually, I'm disappointed, as I gave Philadelphia pretty high marks when making a connection earlier this year. Here's the post. But this scene, spotted in the B Concourse, is pretty awful. Another off-note was a wine bar (open at 9 a.m.!) staffed by one very bored-looking young lady.

Flying U.S. Airways, and the good news is that both our flights are using the same concourse, meaning no long hike or bus trip between gates. But the bad news is: it's the B Concourse, which seems to be the oldest and most tired at Philly.

Albuquerque's Sunport and a sidetrip to Santa Fe

Albuquerque's airport is the noisiest I've ever been in. It's not because of the usual complaint of TVs blaring throughout the concourse. It's the floors.

Albuquerque's 'Sunport,' a handsome complex, has actual brick floors throughout the terminal -- before security, after security, in the bathrooms, everywhere. A touch of southwestern style, I guess.

But when a planeload of passengers all tramp by you en masse with their roller bags, the sound is very much like what happens when you drive on highway rumble strips.

BRAA-GAAA-GAAA-RRRR-RRRR-BRAA-GAAA-GAAA and so on, until the plane empties. And until another one comes in.

Chalk it up to unintended consequences. But still, it doesn't take much away from a nice airport that makes a nice effort to act as a distinctive gateway and an easy-to-use facility.

Not being a hub, the place has only a handful of flights from each of the major carriers, many of them regional jets. But Southwest has long had a presence in Albuquerque, and operates something like three dozen flights a day, or about half the airport's total. (In that sense, Albuquerque is rather like my hometown airport, Manchester-Boston Regional.)

So it's busy enough, but still gets by with a single terminal and two-prong pier. Simple and efficient, and the "grand entrance" is a two-story space about the size of a high school gym, with a replica of an early aircraft hanging from the wooden rafters. Nice!


Post-security, the gate concourse is divided into two piers, with a rather ambitious sculpture acting as a dividing point. It sets the right tone, though it's boxed into a relatively cramped atrium, and is lit from above, making it easy to ignore.


There's some construction going around the sculpture, which led to some partially obscured signage. If you're looking for the "nge," it's this way.


What I liked about the place, though, was the care that went into the details. Even an ordinary billboard kiosk is done with regional design in mind. A pedestal isn't just a pedestal, but a nicely executed exercise in regional stonework.
The flight info displays are state-of-the-art, but they're enclosed in framework of glass panels etched with a local pattern. (The garbage cans lined up in front take away from that, but they've got to go somewhere.)



And, thankfully, the windows aren't horizontal, but actually provide a good view of the tarmac action. The place seems a little earthbound, but then again the regional "abode" style of construction doesn't really lend itself to glass and air and sunlight, does it?


I like the Albuquerque Sunport. When my wife and I arrived, the flight was late, but at least the airport made us feel we'd arrived somewhere distinctive, and told us a little about what kind of a place it was. That was nice, since in the dark, it would have been hard to tell otherwise.

A side trip to Santa Fe: About an hour's drive north of Albuquerque is Santa Fe, state capital of New Mexico and one of the oldest European settlements on the continent. While most people go there for the art scene, airport enthusiasts will be glad to know that Santa Fe is home to a beautifully intact and fully functioning mid-20th century airline terminal, painted a pueblo beige and complete with control tower on top.


Although overshadowed by Albuquerque's busy Sunport to the south, the capital's airport has long enjoyed some level of commercial air service. At one point, TWA ran many flights through here. Lately, the trend has been on the light side. A few years back, no airlines at all stopped here. Today, it's a grand total of three on American Eagle: two to Dallas and one to Los Angeles. And that's it.

AS a result, Santa Fe's airport hasn't felt the need to expand or change or upgrade, other than to accommodate stricter security. You still just drive right up the terminal or park right next to the tarmac and walk across the road to catch your flight. Need a rental car? They there are, all lined up, steps from the counters inside.



The place was pretty quiet when we stopped by -- no flights just then. I moseyed through the darkened ticket counter space to find a boarding area that looked like the dining room of a well-to-do rancher: high beamed ceilings, simple hung-wheel chandelier, southwest style decorator touches, and a hanging model of the original Boeing 707 Air Force One.



Oh -- and a body scanner.

Phoenix Airport: A Tale of Two Concourses

Seen from the air, Phoenix is a mirage by way of Pee Wee Herman. After flying a thousand miles over desolation, you're suddenly banking low over a cartoony patchwork of deep green lawns and dusty vacant lots and bright blue swimming pools. It's a place where tidy aqueducts surface for short stretches and then dive underground again, where gated neighborhoods jammed with mansions sit adjacent to trailer parks, the whole of it baking under an unyielding afternoon sun. (But it's a dry heat!) As our Southwest 737 lined up for a landing at Sky Harbor International, the place looked like nothing I'd ever seen. Which what I expected.

About the airport: it's a disappointment, but with one astounding exception. Much of Sky Harbor has the dim, uninspiring feel of a shopping mall from the 1970s. But all that blandness is nearly balanced out by a single concourse that must rank as one of the great airport spaces in North America, if not the world. Read on.


Sky Harbor's a busy place -- home to a U.S. Airways hub, an important station for Southwest (the airline's fourth-busiest, after Chicago Midway, Las Vegas, and Baltimore), and substantial flight operations by all other major U.S. carriers. British Airways gets into the act with non-stop flights to Heathrow. It's the ninth-busiest airport in the nation, handling nearly 40 million passengers a year. So you'd expect such an important gateway to host a pretty substantial airport.

Well, think again. Our flight (Southwest from Chicago Midway) pulled up to a C Concourse gate in Terminal 4, a sprawling complex that handles about 80 percent of the airport's traffic. Stepping off the jetway, my first experience of Phoenix was classic American nowheresville: low ceilings, fluorescent lights, dull carpeting, few windows, and almost nothing to mark a traveler's arrival in the great American southwest.


Phoenix? This could have been Pittsburgh or Portland -- Maine or Oregon, it wouldn't have mattered.

Our connecting flight (to Albuquerque) was in the D concourse, next one up, so off we went, following a long, straight characterless corridor. The next leg was running late, so I steeled myself for another soul-deadening boring airport layover. Imagine my surprise, then, when we turned the corner to enter the D concourse, and found this:


First impression: Holy cow! Light, air, clean lines, large windows that fronted onto one of PHX's parallel runways, where a Southwest 737 was just rotating up as it zipped past. And sky! You could see sky! Walking further in, I began picking up on details: the strange oversized canopies over each gate, the unique compass pattern of the floor tiles, the generous amount of public art (including a wacky and completely functionless arch), and all done in materials that reminded me of where I was in the world.


I had stumbled onto Concourse D, opened in 2005, the newest part of Terminal 4. The rest of the 80-gate complex dates back to 1990, apparently still the era of ugly airport architecture, at least in Phoenix. How anyone could build a completely new 80-gate airline terminal complex in 1990 and have it come out so blah is beyond me. Something to do with air conditioning, perhaps?


Back to the present: Concourse D has only eight gates, but it felt big. And open. And important. Passing through, coming or going, the place had enough good vibes going to make you feel like you were doing something special. Like all good transportation buildings, if functioned like a church: it bestowed significance. In its design, it said this: "Entering or leaving our city is an occasion that's important enough to take place in a fittingly grand setting."



It also said this: "If this concourse is any indication, the rest of Phoenix and the region served by this airport is one happening place."

Pretty good for a space with just eight gates. How did they do it? By paying attention to the big picture, I think, but not losing sight of details.

The layout is simple: a pier juts out onto the tarmac, four gates on either side. But the genius part is at the end of the pier. What usually happens here is that additional gates are clustered at the end to maximize the number of aircraft positions. Makes sense, but the result is often a blocked-in claustrophobic dead end, like you see here in Concourse C:


Well, not at Phoenix's Concourse D. Here, it ends in a giant window that extends from floor up to high ceiling, and offers unobstructed views of one of airports very active runways. This serves to reconnect travelers with the magic and power of flight, and creates an immense amount of excitement. As a bonus, it also floods the space with light. And, dear sweet mother of God, the windows panes are not the trendy but evil horizontal shape. Whoever make this decision chose right, thankfully avoiding the "window as fence in gulag or stockyard" look.

Paradoxically, the big window makes the concourse seem both infinite and intimate at the same time. The great wall of glass serves to include the outdoors as part of the space, making it seem grand. But it also acts as a natural gathering point, acting as a destination that naturally attracts visitors to it. Concourse D isn't that big, but the distance to Gate D8 out at the end doesn't seem nearly so bothersome when there's such a wonderful magnet drawing you there.


But there's more. Look up! Rather than a flat roof, Concourse D sports a creased top, with the lowest part running along the center and either side flaring up and out, which allows more glass, which means more sky and light. This design makes the place seem bigger, but it's more than that. By its appearance and shape, the roof helps the concourse celebrate the act of flight. (See the photos above.)

Let me explain. I think the best airport buildings find ways to use design to create anticipation and excitement through symbol and appearance. In a structure that stands completely still, they somehow capture the excitement of motion and the freedom of flight.

Good examples are the acclaimed terminals designed at the dawn of the jet age by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen: the ex-Trans World Airlines hub at New York's JFK Airport and the main terminal of the then-new Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Here's what they look like from the outside:



In both cases, Saarinen used the roof to create a dramatic space that expressed the magic of flight that really must have been present in the pre-deregulation age. (I got just the barest taste of that as a kid in the early 1970s, when our mother made my two brothers and me wear a coat and tie to fly coach to visit our uncle in Atlanta!)

Well, deregulation or not, the act of flight is still an age-old dream that we in the present day have realized. And the best airport spaces acknowledge and celebrate that -- something that I think is even more important in the age of security lines and packed airplanes and extra fees.

In Phoenix, Concourse D does this by literally opening up to the sky. The ceiling soars diagonally up and out, making us feel we're already airborne. It's quite a neat effect. And contrast that with, say, Denver, where the main terminal's signature white fabric tent peaks work exactly the opposite way, sloping down in all directions, making a traveler feel small and puny. (And which from a distance look like a pack of Ku Klux Klansmen. See below.)


In Phoenix, the ceiling crease is duplicated in the big window, by the way, which helps tie the whole place together and employing perspective to make it all seem so much bigger than it really is. It's like you're inside a box being unfolded. The central metaphor in all of this, I suppose, is that of a bird in flight. Maybe that's kind of simple-minded, but then sometimes simple is best.

Perspective is also used in four unconventional canopies gracing the boarding areas, two per gate, which looked to me like drawbridges being lowered. (Maybe that's the intent? After all, they're leading to gates.) These are slanted, but in the opposite direction of the ceiling, so they start high and drop lower. This has the effect of making the place seem even bigger!


Colors, materials, and details are all in harmony with each other, and with what you'd expect in the American Southwest. Bathrooms and eating places all worked well. Even so, the place is graced with some daring public art that challenges even as it welcomes.

For instance, the arch. I can't explain its purpose or its appearance. To me, it looked like an ice sculpture you might see at the Quebec Winter Carnival, and what that has to do with Phoenix, Ariz. is beyond me. But here's the thing: it stood guard over the entrance to the concourse, offering absolutely no barrier, as if in mockery of all the security checkpoints that rule air travel today. How refreshing to encounter something that says "Walk Right Through As Much As You Like!"


Also, the wall that backs up against the rest of the complex is filled with shiny metal abstract sculptures. I'm not prepared to explain their significance, either, but I can tell you the effect they produce, at least when I was there. With the late afternoon sun sinking low, all the light flooding in horizontally hit these things and then was scattered in a million different directions, filling the concourse interior with a kind of crystalline sunlight.


If I had one issue with Concourse D, it's that they didn't resist the temptation to install televisions in the gate areas. And once the sun goes down, they reflect off the darkened window glass, causing passengers to be surrounded with multiple images, sometimes of competing stations. Ugh.

I'm not sure if Concourse D seems so good because the rest of Phoenix Airport is so bad, but it's possible. The rest of Terminal 4 is a low-ceilinged pedestrian-unfriendly horror show. If nothing else, it acts as a symbol of the area it serves only in the sense that it's a desert of effective airport design.

We had time, so I took a walk around the whole place. It took forever, because, like Phoenix itself, Terminal 4 sprawls. Passengers switching concourses are forced on seemingly endless treks through long straight passages the exact opposite of Concord D -- they seem longer than they should, which is the last thing you want to do to add stress to a plane change.

I'll give them credit for at least keeping views open to the tarmacs and runways, and not cluttering up the passageways with retail kiosk that obliterate sightlines. (They save those for the actual concourses themselves.)

One thing they do do is treat travelers to historical aircraft info etched right onto the glass, giving you a chance to bone up on your B377 Stratocruiser trivia. Unfortunately, people on the moving walkways can't take them in (I missed them entirely until I finally noticed one), and those on foot and making a connection are probably too busy to care.


Any alternatives to schlepping insane distances on foot? Glad you asked! PHX is close to finishing a light rail line that will connect Terminals 2, 3, and 4 (what happened to 1?) with a remote parking area. Set to open in 2013, its distinctive feature is what airport officials claim is the only airport transit bridge in the world with enough clearance to handle the world's largest passenger aircraft. Guess they don't like tunneling in Phoenix. Anyway, the result is a taxiway that crosses over a terminal access road on a bridge, then goes under the new bridge. Here's a Frontier Airbus trying it on for size:


Otherwise, the rest of Terminal 4 is endless blah of lookalike concourses, emphasis on the endless. It's like a trip back in time to the world's largest mall but in the 1970s, but with the stores removed. (Darn! Just when I could have used some Orange Julius!)


Two things made the walk worth taking. I saw not one but two active shoeshine stands, a rarity in this kind of airport and something that provided at least a little character. Also, I happened to be there when the British Airways flight was in pre-boarding, so I checked out the airline's Upper Class lounge. What a hoot! Go up a stairway and through a door, and you're in Gatwick Airport, seemingly. There's tea and coffee, private wood-lined "callbox" kiosks for privacy in using the telephone, and a garrulous female attendant who encouraged me to look around.

I didn't get into the Terminal 4 terminal itself, but it's submerged underneath a parking garage and looks to be of the concrete-brutalism-this-is-the-future school of design, just like the rest of the place. It's a pity. If the rest of the airport matched Concourse D, you'd have a candidate for best airport in the nation, and one of the best anywhere.

Chicago O'Hare: Terminal One

I passed through the United Airlines Terminal 1 complex at Chicago O'Hare Airport on Sunday, June 19 and again on Tuesday, June 21, so time for an update.

This is one of my favorite airline terminals anywhere. Originally designed by Helmut Jahn in the mid-1980s as United's chief hub and to evoke the great Victorian-era railroad trainsheds of yore, it celebrates travel. It's highlighted by the wonderful light sculpture, 'The Sky's the Limit,' that has been beguiling travelers in the tunnel between Concourse B and C for more than 20 years now. Amazing that a for-profit company could invest in building a structure as ambitious and inspiring as this -- something possible when the legacy airlines were still flush, which is no longer the case.




And yes, not even two decades of creeping-crud commercialism (afterthought retail kiosks that block the views, massive banners and video displays hanging from the ceiling, and multiple changing airline logo schemes) have diluted the excitement and energy of Terminal One. Like Grand Central Station in New York when it was buried under billboards and grime, it remains a great space.

A detailed inventory of its state was posted by me in October, 2010. A half-year later, the big news is that United has a new color scheme (blue, yellow, and white, thanks to its merger with Continental) and there has actually been some action taken to keep Terminal One from completely suffocating from commercial add-ons.

True, the kiosks are still everywhere, with businesses such as 'NUTS on CLARK' or phone/Internet clusters blocking the vistas of planes parked right up against the glass. But I noticed a fewer banners hanging from the ceilings, which opened up the interior viewscapes a little, and some of the most egregious logo-placement (such as on the escalator railings!) has been taken down.

Regarding the new colors and revised "globe" logo, they've been applied everywhere. Not a tulip (the company's long-standing 1970s-era logo) to be seen, except out on the tarmac, on planes one or two paint schemes behind. The only place yellow shows up big-time, though, is in the Terminal B check-in area; for the most part, it's not a noticeable difference. One thing, however, is that the terminal's original design called for red accents in places such as the tile borders or those hard-to-read gate signs, and they're still in place. So it creates a little visual discord, since red has been banished. Same with the pinstripe frosted glass. Let's hope they just leave it alone.

I'm not sure this is the case, but it seemed that gate areas had fewer TVs blaring the CNN airport channel at full volume, which is a major improvement. But one thing I can't understand is why the terminal's gray light-control shades get lowered on the non-sun sides of the building. In the B concourse on Tuesday afternoon, this unnecessarily blocked all the airside views, as if people couldn't possibly be interested in what's going on out beyond the glass. (See the picture for a sample of what you're missing.) Maybe some don't care, but no wonder few people get excited about flying anymore.

Also, viewed from the outside, the whole B concourse seems desperately in need of a good washing. Maybe more than that, because last I heard it sometimes rains in Chicago.

And how about the chairs these guys are sitting on? Want to use the phone? Tough luck. Plus, payphones are clearly just for losers anyway, right?

What can we learn from Penn Station?

This blog is about airline terminals, but today's topic is a railroad station. It doesn't exist anymore, but I just visited it. Confused? Read on, and let's see what we can learn.

It's the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City—the monumental Beaux Arts masterpiece of architect Charles McKim that was unceremoniously demolished in the mid-1960s to make way for the then-new Madison Square Garden.

While the station's above-ground buildings were torn down, all the railroad tracks and platforms remain in place deep underground, pretty much as they were when the original station opened in 1910. Trains still rumble in and out—enough so that the place remains the busiest passenger rail station in the country.

What's above the platforms, however, ain't what it used to be.

In McKim's original station, passengers alighted from trains onto platforms flooded with natural light that streamed in from a vaulted glass ceiling more than 100 feet above. Ornate brass and iron staircases carried arriving passengers to the upper level of the magnificent glass and iron concourse, designed as an homage to the great European trainsheds. It provided a grand welcome to one of the world's great cities.

Today, passengers step off trains onto those same platforms, only to cower underneath a grimy concrete ceiling that looms a few feet above. Claustrophobia-inducing pipes and ducts hang from it. Lighting is harsh—you can't tell whether it's day or night. The air is still. It's noisy, but you can't tell where the noise is coming from.

It's also not clear where you go next. Eventually you're herded up cramped escalators to a confusing warren of yet more low-ceiled passages, with no windows and no light until you finally emerge onto the street much later, assuming you ever do. It's like arriving in New York through the service entrance.

In one area, it's a masterpiece—efficiency, because it inspires an overwhelming desire to get the heck out of there as fast as possible.

The difference between the original terminal and what replaced it—does it matter? Yes. The original was a great public space, a constant inspiration to travellers, a gateway that enobled all who passed through it, and helped make New York City a kick-ass place, whether you were coming or going.

The replacement is fit for hamsters, but not humans, and certainly not for a place known for its superlatives. In short, it's a bust.

It's so dreadful that Amtrak (successor to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which built the original station and then allowed it to be torn down) has been considering a hugely expensive plan to transform the equally monumental former post office building (next door, also designed by Charles McKim at the same time) into a newly reborn Penn Station. It'll cost billions, if it ever gets done, and my guess is it won't.

I never got to experience the original Penn Station. Never used it to board a train, never walked through it, never got to hear the constant manmade murmur that I'm told bounced off its marble walls. So it's easy for me to romanticize it as the “greatest of all train terminals.”

And true, I sometimes think that if there is an afterlife and it's a nice place and if I'm somehow qualified to be there, I imagine it would look something like the concourse of the original Penn Station.

As beautiful as the station was, it had problems. Some say it was too overwhelming. Some cursed the vast scale that had to be covered to reach the train platforms, and the lack of anyplace at all to sit in the vast main hall. The main dining hall and the separate waiting rooms for men and women weren't thought out well. And, most importantly, the facility was hugely expensive to maintain and even to keep clean, which made it easier for the Pennsy to say buh-bye when the railroad fell on hard times.

So this raises the question: What happens when a private company builds a grand public space such as a train terminal, but then can't maintain it? One answer is what happened to Penn Station. But another is what happened to New York City's other big train station, Grand Central Terminal. That nearly got demolished, too, but eventually the run-down property came under government management (specifically, the MTA), which mounted a massive restoration effort supported by public money.

Today, Grand Central is celebrated as a city icon, still in use as a very busy railroad station but also a magnet for tourists. Penn Station is a magnet for lunatics, who feel right at home in its Rubik's cube-like tunnels.

Ironically, Grand Central only serves commuter lines; all long-distance trains now use Penn. Gone are the days when Cary Grant, as in the Hitchcock thriller 'North by Northwest ,' could duck into Grand Central and slip aboard the 20th Century Limited to get out of town.

So what does this all have to do with airport terminals?

Well, in terms of design, the original Pennsylvania made a sound case for terminal as modern-day cathedral, a fitting setting for departures and arrivals that marked important moments in countless lives. It enriched everyone who encountered it, and that's something that airline terminals (the train stations of our day) ought to aspire to. Penn Station showed the way.

However, the original Penn Station was built by an incredibly rich private corporation, the Pennsylvania Railroad, at the height of its power, in the early 20th century. Its main visionary, railroad president Alexander Cassett, was in a position to spare no expense in creating a station that would serve as a physical symbol of the railroad's influence and success.

Well, that position was only a very short window. Railroads were soon in decline in the U.S., the Pennsy included. So the huge effort required to build such a grand edifice was similar to, say, the Apollo effort to put a man on the moon: the result of a special confluence of circumstances that enabled it to happen, and which may not happen again for a long time, if ever.

Can we build the equivalent of Penn Station today? Well, the airline business is subject to more fast-moving turmoil than any railroad ever was. Airlines come and go, hubs are built and taken apart, great carriers merge and disappear from their hometowns.

So it's easy to understand why airlines themselves often aren't willing to put a lot of effort into facilities. Look at the abandoned concourses in St. Louis (former TWA hub), Cincinnati (former Delta hub), and especially Pittsburgh, where a new midfield concourse was built for USAirways, large portions of which are now walled-off and abandoned since the carrier de-hubbed.

Yes, it's a different model today. Airlines, which are for-profit businesses, do put money into terminals where they know they're going to be around for awhile. It's money well spent. But otherwise, it's up to government (meaning the public) to rise to the challenge of building and maintaining a terminal that enobles the traveller. And in an age of austerity budgets, there's a temptation to take the cheapest, most expeditious route—to go the way of the “new” Penn Station, which everyone agrees is a monstrosity. Is that the best we can do?

But I think the basic lesson still stands (unlike the original Penn Station): that our public spaces say a lot about who we are, and it's worth the effort to make them distinctive and memorable. In other words, old Penn Station, not new Penn Station, to whatever extent possible.

Postscript: Though the original Penn Station has been gone for nearly 50 years, a few traces still survive in the current subway-station-like facility, if you know where to look. Coming across them, still doing their jobs amid all the blandness, is like finding an old wheat cent in change. It's a survivor from another era, not that long gone but absolutely gone for good.

The most obvious leftovers are two original brass and iron staircases that still take travelers up from the platforms. While most platforms are jammed with chunky escalators and elevators, for some reason these graceful survivors soldier on.

One is on the east end of the platform for Tracks 13 and 14; it's short, going up just one level to the “arrivals” concourse, and is now partially covered in battleship gray. But it's there, complete with the gateway grille at the base of the steps and the original iron support pillar under the first landing. I used it to exit from my train.

The other is on the platform between Tracks 5 and 6. It's a complete multi-landing original staircase bringing travelers from the main ticketing level (the floor of the former concourse) all the way down to the platform. It's now hemmed in by tiled walls, and the ornate ironwork at the bottom is damaged and partially missing, but it's ready to carry passengers just as in photos taken prior to the station's 1910 grand opening.

Access to to most platforms at Penn Station are controlled by gate agents and tickets are required, so I was surprised to find the old staircase (behind glass doors) open. So down I went, taking pictures, marveling at the original brass handrails and also the irony of the photos of the old Penn Station decorating the stairwell.

The original Pennsylvania Station was built for the ages. Instead, it lasted barely 50 years. Its loss was one of the world's great acts of architectural vandalism, and led to new rules protecting similar landmarks in New York City and elsewhere. In terms of terminals, it showed us what's possible. Would that we had the wisdom, the resources, and the long-term outlook to learn and profit from its example.

Amtrak notes: My recent trip was a good reminder about the importance of public announcements in any form of transit. Our train, Northeast Regional 174, was scheduled to depart Penn Station at 2 p.m., but was a few minutes late. No problem. But along the way, we made repeated stops between station, and the delay began to grow.

By the time we left New Haven, we were at least a half-hour behind, maybe more. I don't know for sure because throughout all of this, not a single annoucement was made to anyone about it. And the stops continued. Anytime a conductor came through, people asked what time we were due in such-and-such a stop, and the answers seemed to vary wildly.

Amtrak's online train status feature had us as 28 minutes behind as we pulled into Providence, so at least that was something. But the train crew made no announcements whatsoever, leaving people grumbling and shaking their heads and generally unhappy. Some kind of announcement about the nature of the delay would have gone a looooong way toward keeping people happy, but we got bupkiss.

I do think it depends on the crews, which seem to vary widely. Sometimes you get thorough and coherent explanations; other times they make an effort, but a malfunctioning P.A. system renders it unintelligible. And other times, like today, you get nothing at all, which is unacceptable.

On Northeast Regional 174 on Friday, May 20, the crew seemed to be by turns belligerent, combative, uninformed, or entirely absent. And it really makes a difference. Across from me was a woman going to Bridgeport, Conn. who was burdened with a huge piece of luggage and who had never travelled by train ever before. I helped her with the bag (no problem there), but the real fun happened when Bridgeport was the next stop.

At one point, the train began to slow and enter a station, but we had no announcement, so the woman assumed it had to be Bridgeport. She hastily got up, hauled her bag out on her own, and then went into the vestibule at the end of the car to detrain.

The problem was, we weren't at Bridgeport, but at another station, South Norwalk, where we were halting for apparently yet another delay, and on an inside “express track,” with a commuter train on one side of us blocking the view. Our train finally did stop, and we were at a station, and this poor woman began panicking in the vestibule because she wasn't sure how to get off.

Other people were standing in the aisle and I finally asked a woman to tell her that her stop wasn't until a bit later. What confusion, where a few clear announcements could have made all the difference. Talk note, Amtrak. Might want to brush up on the customer service skills.

And that takes us to Amtrak's so-called “quiet” cars. These are designed for passengers who want a refuge from loud conversations or serial cell-phone yakkers. It's a nice idea, and it's amazing that they even try to do this in a country such as America, and especially in the Northeast, where people can be amazingly clueless about public behavior.

But they do, and the crew members really do make an effort—sometimes. On some trains, I've sat in the quiet car, and crews go to the trouble to make special “sotto voci” announcements just for the occupants, explaining that it's a library-like atmosphere and they're serious about no cell phone use—if you must yak, please sit in another car. (On Northeast Regional 174, there were no announcements whatsoever, either about the quiet car or where the cafe car was or about upcoming stops, which seems downright irresponsible. Not sure what the story is with that.)

Still, I like sitting in the Quiet Car, not because I necessarily crave quiet, but because there's always drama when some clueless schlub sits down and immediately start chatting loudly on his or her cell phone. (In practice, though, it's usually a guy.) Sometimes a crew member will be right there, telling the person to leave the car, and sometimes the reactions are priceless.

Other times, passengers themselves enforce the code of silence. On today's Northeast Regional 174, two old acquaintances passing the Quiet Car through discovered each other, and a loud mini-reunion ensued right here in the aisle, almost directly below a 'Quiet Car' sign. No crew members were present, and even if they were I doubt they'd have said anything, since there was no mention of the quiet car at any time during the run; in fact, crew members would march through, loudly talking among themselves or fielding questions about the delays. With the mini-reunion, it finally fell to yours truly to politely inform the ladies that they were in what was supposed to be the Quiet Car. They had no idea, of course, and the immediately decamped after thanking me.

I think I should get an honorary crew badge from Amtrak, but I don't hold out much hope.

Chicago O'Hare, Concourse E & F, Terminal 2

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.

Philadelphia Airport: Surprisingly Good

I changed planes at Philadelphia Airport on Saturday, May 7, 2011, and liked what I saw. Nice surprises included vertical windows in some concourses, an absence of blaring TVs in gate areas, a fantastic food court, an interesting on-the-tarmac bus shuttle service, and some wonderful plane-watching spots equipped with rocking chairs. Here's the detail:

Arrived late afternoon on a U.S. Airways regional jet flight from Manchester, N.H. Pulled up to Concourse F, which handles all the airline's commuter flights at this busy U.S. Airways hub. Flew in on a CRJ200, which docked at a jetway leading up to a concourse raised one story above the tarmac.

After disembarking, I was surprised to see the floor of the other side of Concourse F (opposite of where we arrived) to be flush with the tarmac. People were coming off a plane by descending steps and then just walking into the gate area. I have to imagine this was done to handle smaller craft (too small for jetways, anyway) more effectively. Never seen it anywhere else. Unusual, and very smart!

The F concourse, which opened in 2001, was a cut above most new commuter hub complexes. For one thing, the main part of the structure is built on a slight arc, which I think is far superior than the straight “death march” kind of concourse you usually have to settle for. It's less intimidating. Also, the place has high ceilings and larger windows in some gate areas. Alas, the dreaded horizontal window does make an appearance here and there, but it's almost acceptable as a source of variety, I think.

The whole place culminates mid-concourse in a two-story atrium designed to funnel people on and off a system of shuttle buses that carry connecting passengers to the other concourses used by USAirways at Philadelphia: A, B & C. (But they're on the other side of the airport. Who planned this out?) The atrium, decorated with some really unattractive "crazy crap" art hanging from the ceiling, is dominated by video displays listing arrivals and departures, which in turn are surrounded by a huge billboard for Amtrak's Acela Express train service featuring the slogan “You have the right to reduce your carbon footprint.” Whoever came up with that positioning should get a bonus.

The bus loading area was somewhat chaotic. One problem: It's not immediately clear that separate buses head to different concourses, and it's also not clear which buses go where. So you get several harried employees shouting, and things still aren't clear. Well, one thing is: time-pressed connecting passengers do not want to stand in a non-moving line, and they especially don't want to find out it's the wrong one. And once on the bus, the announcements were so distorted as to be unintelligible.

The bus shuttle is a good thing, though, as it gets people out on the tarmac among the taxiways and aircraft, always a good thing that adds to the experience. What's more, our bus ride entailed some unexpected drama. Rounding the end of Concourse E on our marked path, our bus driver came nearly nose to nose with a Southwest Airlines 737 turning into the gate area. We stopped to let it go in front of is (I guess 737s have the right of way), but then it became apparent that the jet wasn't turining to cross in front of us. Rather, it was heading for a gate right at the end of the concourse that we happened to be blocking!

So we had to back up, and the 737 continued its way into the gate, but the starboard winglet passed just above the driver's cab—close enough for him to back up just a bit further to ensure clearance. Meanwhile, our windshield was filled with the landing gear as it rolled past. Nice! In my book, anything that gets people closer to the planes is good, and this was truly up close and personal!

My departing flight (to Chicago O'Hare) was at the C Concourse, which is entirely devoted to U.S. Airways mainline flights. It's pretty cramped, all the more so flights converge, which is what I got to experience. Very little aviation feel walking to my gate; instead, it felt like an undersized shopping mall. It was hard to believe you were in an airport and about the experience the miracle of flight, especially when some of the few spots where windows DID open up onto the tarmac had been colonized by shopping kiosks so we can buy more crap made in China.

But then I reached the far end of the concourse, which dead-ends in a T. There I saw three things that were welcome indeed. First, a wonderfully open waiting area (with banks of vertical windows!) tucked into the gate area of one side of the T. Looking at the TV screens, I saw a “visual page” for a passenger, a service offered to passengers hard of hearing, which was pretty neat. And then, looking out at a U.S. Airways Airbus 320 painted in the retro paintscheme of Allegheny Airlines, one of its predecessor, I noticed that instead of the usual CNN TV blather washing over the waiting passengers, there was classical music! Yes, TV screens were present, but the sound was either off or so quiet I didn't hear it. Instead, I heard Mozart. Big plus!

But that's not all. Heading over to Concourse B, I got to use a nifty moving walkway that by itself is nothing special, but its location is superb: all along the back wall of the terminal that anchors the two concourses. So for a few minutes, connecting passengers are treated to a fantastic view of aircraft, the apron, and the runways beyond. At the halfway point, where the walkway breaks, there's a small area where you can sit in sturdy rocking chairs and watch the action. Inspired!

There's also an inner connecting passage between Concourses B & C that acts like, yes, another shopping mall, but it's rooming and less claustrophobic than the gate concourses themselves. Lots more rocking chairs helps, as does a surprisingly large food court at the half-way point, midway between B & C. Dominated by yet another multi-panel arrival and departures board (crucial for people connecting), the space has a wonderfully dramatic feel to it, and also looks out over the area of the terminal outside the security zone, so it breaks down that barrier and feels a lot more open and airy: good things for an airport to be!

One word on airport food prices. I get torqued at prices that are obviously predatory, and this seems to happen a lot in airports. For example, at my own airport, Manchester-Boston Regional, I was stunned to see an ordinary package of Doritos on sale for $2.39! You could get it for 99 cents at a gas station just off airport property. In Philadelphia, they seem to have this under control. Yes, the same package of Doritos was $1.99 (still way overpriced), but just down the concourse an Express Asian place gave me a big heap of spicy coleslaw for just $4 plus tax. Inexpensive, and healthy to boot. Why can't this be as prevalent as overpriced processed food?

I didn't pass through Concourse A or the airport's relatively new international terminal this time, but I have in the past, and they're pretty good, too. Not sure I understand the long, low rising arc design (the International Terminal at Chicago O'Hare is similar), as the way it hugs the earth seems to be the very antithesis of the magic and excitement of flight. But at least they're trying – and well they should. As a major domestic and international hub for U.S. Airways, and a key destination for other airlines, the place ought to have a terminal complex that bespeeks the city's ambitions. From what I saw, it comes closer than most.