"Security concerns," explains Phil Orlandella, spokesman for the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport). Massport has been the tower's landlord since it opened in '73, and Orlandella's office sits in its shadow, in a corridor halfway between terminals B and C, near where the Piedmont jets once docked.
I'm not quite buying the explanation, much as I expected it, but Orlandella shrugs when pressed for specifics. "Logan is entirely different," he says. "Everything has changed here, from the subway station to the terminals. The observation deck is gone. Lots of things are gone. And lots of things are new." He's certainly right about that. Above us, that control tower stands in aloof detachment, a fatherly sentry presiding over what has been a ceaseless melee of construction, demolition and refurbishment. At its feet, the airport is finally quiet after a $4.4 billion modernization scheme -- a 12-year snarl of cranes, scaffolding and Jersey barriers.
I ask Orlandella if the work is truly finished.
"Soon," he answers. Orlandella has a north-of-Boston accent and a clipped way of talking that seems to have subsumed every minute of his Massport tenure -- a quarter-century of dealing with storms, accidents, angry activists, and doubters like me. "Terminal A was the last big piece," he explains, referring to the $482 million facility funded by Massport and Delta Air Lines, opened in March 2005.
Orlandella agrees to take me to the 16th floor, where I haven't set foot in over two decades. "Have you got a picture ID?" The elevator lobby I once sauntered through now includes a sign-in sheet and requires an official escort. As the elevator door closes, I'm hit by the smell -- a damp, industrial, rubbery odor reminiscent of a parking garage -- that has remained unchanged since the 1970s. Nothing gets the synapses of memory firing like the rush of olfactory recognition, and as the car begins to climb I feel as if I'm standing in a time machine.
But then the door opens, and everything is different. The observation deck has become Massport's Communications and Operations Center, with a suite of monitors and consoles that make it look like a miniature NASA command room. This is the headquarters of airport logistics, where a full-time staff of four coordinates everything from snow removal to emergencies. In the spot where I used to sit with binoculars amid Puerto Rican families from Maverick Square, a Massport employee hovers in a telescoping chair, a display of incoming flights over his shoulder. (Five stories above us rests the tower cab -- the crow's-nest in which air traffic controllers, working in shifts of 11, shepherd an unending choreography of takeoffs and landings -- more than a thousand daily.)
Outside, the view is both exactly the same and totally changed. It's no less sublime in breadth, if vastly changed in detail.
The first thing I notice is cars. Lots of them, milling speedily in every direction. Formerly a simple, counterclockwise loop just a few lanes wide, the interterminal roadway has become a shoelace knot of crossovers and switchbacks.
In the far distance I'm able to spot the MBTA's rebuilt Blue Line station. Logan was America's first airport with a rapid transit connection (1952), and although the new platform is markedly better than the original, which was literally falling to pieces, few will be reminded of places like Amsterdam, Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, where one is whisked to and from the city center without the need to step outside. Boston's version remains a two-step journey with transfer to a bus.
At the center of that tangle stands the Logan Hilton, noteworthy less for its own aesthetic merits -- a forked, red brick mid-rise webbed by a glass foyer -- than as a welcome replacement for the shabby, dun-colored hotel it replaced. The Hilton is handsome, if utterly indistinguishable from a thousand other layover franchises the world over. Adjacent to the Hilton is the massively expanded central parking area. Sadly, at Logan's very heart, where an optimist might envision some greenery or a dash of architectural flair, one finds a gargantuan, desertlike spread of concrete.
In a gesture of consolation, branching from the Central Garage are a pair of climate-controlled pedestrian bridges, their terrazzo floors fetchingly inlaid with sea-life mosaics. Previously, certain airline-to-airline transfers meant several minutes of sidewalk time and a ride on Massport's shuttle. With the walkways now in place, there's covered access -- and a smidgen of ancient Rome -- between any two carriers.
On the terminal side, the basic overview -- a sprawling handprint of four independent complexes -- remains intact. I'm touched to recognize many of the same concrete aprons and T-shaped piers I knew as a kid. Except everything has, in one way or another, been remodeled, rebuilt and enlarged. Annexes and appendages sprout everywhere, covering what used to be vacant space.
Terminals C appears the least altered. Terminal B, on the other hand, is substantially muscled, its main tenants -- American Airlines and US Airways -- having spent millions on expansion. Phil Orlandella furrows his brow. "Right there," he says, nodding toward a Jetway. Unlike those around it, this particular boarding tunnel is topped with an American flag. It's gate B-32, from where American Airlines flight 11 pushed back on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, described by Orlandella as "the worst friggin' day of my life." Slightly to the left, at Terminal C, is the point from where United's flight 175 departed minutes later.
Along the south side of the terminal cluster rises the new Terminal A, occupied by Delta. The enormous white building is eco-friendly and spacious, with state-of-the-art everything (a laser-guided aircraft docking system) and, airports being airports, an impressive gantlet of shopping venues. Alas, Delta's troubles have left it something of a literal white elephant, operating at around half capacity. This cutting edge showpiece is also unattractively low-slung. From the roadway one approaches a kind of corporate glacier -- an immense slab of whiteness and glass that looks more like an office park, or a mall, than an airport's supposed crown jewel. Inside is a stultifying lack of color, with barely a trace of Delta's signature blue and red. The pudding-hued gateside carpeting is an especially odd choice.
What I miss about the original Terminal A, a stately edifice of brown masonry built for Eastern in 1969, is a certain drama both inside and out. The latticed façade and five-story archways bore a certain likeness to the lower curtain wall of the World Trade Center -- and not by accident, for both were the work of architect Minoru Yamasaki. Stepping into the lobby, your gaze was drawn upward by a soaring vaulted ceiling. It wasn't beautiful, but it did something not many terminals do these days: It imparted a sense of exhilaration and theater.
Massport has revised its long-time terminal lettering system. Terminal D, Orlandella explains, crossing one arm over the other as he points, has become part of C. Terminal E, meanwhile, is to be rechristened as D. Possibly that makes some sense, but the sequencing confusion as it stands -- ABCE? -- seems symptomatic of the entire view below. All together, the airport looks lost in itself -- a great sunken bowl of anonymous geometric fortresses -- a jumble of mismatched old and new, absent of a coherent theme or locus -- interlaced by a disorienting web of byways and overpasses.
And ironically, while the terminal expansions have been, if nothing else, radical, it's the airside zone that remains in desperate need of an upgrade. To a pilot, if not to the passenger, Logan is the Fenway Park of airports -- small, quaint, and infrastructurally inefficient. The nation's 18th-busiest airport in volume of flights, it's historically one of the most congested. The criss-crossing runways and meandering taxiways seem to emulate downtown Boston itself, where ancient cow paths became too-busy streets. Skylights and mosaics might be elegant and attractive, but they won't resolve the delays that stem from its layout. At long last, construction of a long-debated relief runway has begun along the harbor at the foot of Bird Island Flats. Once operational, the strip should alleviate much of the problem. (For background on Logan's bad-weather gridlock, see here.
In terms of raw functionality, the New Logan is a welcome one. It'd be foolish to begrudge an airport for succeeding in its core mission, however unromantic it happens to be: to efficiently process, feed and otherwise distract throngs of people -- 27 million annually in this case -- transiting between ground and flight. Yet regrettably, and perhaps inexcusably, what hasn't materialized is any defining piece of work -- something iconic, grand and recognizable at once to everybody who lands here.
Well, actually there is one. It just happens to be 33 years old, and I happen to be standing in it. The architects at Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum may have poured their ambitions into Terminal A, but it's the Perini Construction Co.'s lumbering control tower that impels the most obvious sense of place. Looming overhead with anthropomorphic bravado (it really does resemble a giant robot) and staid New England resilience, this nameless old building is, then and now, the traveler's touchstone and one of Boston's most exclamatory fixtures of identity.
Airports! Airports!
Newark, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu
Bangor, Gander, Mandalay and other "international" airports
Madness and malapropisms at Tokyo-Narita
Caracas, Venezuela -- where DC-9s go to die
Searching for soul and sky at America's most colorful airport
Terminal One -- stalking the ghosts of Gotham at JFK international
- -- - -- - -- - -- - -- - -
Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.
About the writer
Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. His column is archived here and his previous articles for Salon can be found here.
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