La Guardia Airport to Get a Makeover

La Guardia Airport, whose dilapidated terminals and long, unenviable record of traveler delays have made it a target of jokes and complaints for decades, will be completely rebuilt by 2021, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Monday.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport in northern Queens, estimates the overhaul will cost about $4 billion, most of which will go toward tearing down the Central Terminal Building, rebuilding it in place and augmenting it with a grand entry way.

The project “replaces the airport in its entirety,” Mr. Cuomo said at a Midtown Manhattan luncheon for the Association for a Better New York. He said that airport officials and planners had concluded that there was no way to fix La Guardia, that it essentially had to be torn down and rebuilt. With no place to create a substitute anywhere near Manhattan, they decided it had to remain crammed between Flushing Bay and the Grand Central Parkway.

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6 Comments

  • declasse' intellectual

    Three future forecasts for the time frame that this project will be completed: (1) It will be over budget; (2) it will be not on time, and (3) it will be already out of date!

    • Milhouse

      The first two are inevitable; the third, maybe as well, but it will be a lot less out of date than the current one. This actually looks like a decent plan, and if it were being run by a private company that didn’t have to use union labor or curry favor with politicians it would probably be implemented well. As it is, it may be the best that we can hope for. LGA certainly needs redevelopment.

  • Ezra

    More importantly, are they going to use any of this money to build a subway line that actually goes all the way to the airport?

    • Milhouse

      No. If you read the article (or if you remember Cuomo’s announcement in January) you will see that there will be an airtrain from WIllet’s Point on the 7 line.

      Part of the problem is that cities are not allowed to use the airport tax to expand their local transport system. That money has to be used only to improve airports, and if cities were allowed to use it for airport-related improvements to their local transport systems you’d quickly see them thinking up reasons why almost any transport improvement would someow benefit the airport. So extending the subway would have to be funded from some other source, whereas an airtrain can be paid for out of the airport tax.

    • Milhouse

      What’s he got to do with it? Neither the MTA nor the Port Authority answer to him.