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Of JFK Airport’s many faults, which include Odyssian distance from Manhattan and staggering politician-induced flight delays, none is quite as aggravating as the condition of Delta’s terminal complex.
Terminal 3, which opened in the 1960s as the Pan Am Worldport and managed to escape the following five decades with only minimal improvement, is now festooned with kite-like leak catchers and a complicated system (series?) of rubber tubes that divert rainwater from the terminal’s crumbling ceiling (a couple of them are shown in the photo below).
Terminal 2, which is connected to Delta’s other building by a sequence of broken moving walkways, has likewise avoided any major upgrades since it was built for some other long-defunct carrier in the middle of the last century (Eastern Airlines? I’m writing this on my phone from a worn seat in a threadbarely-carpeted waiting area, so research is difficult).
Over the last decade, JFK has gone through an impressive modernization process; the pleasant-enough Airtrain whisks me to the airport from the thrillingly-rebuilt Jamaica Station in less time than it takes a bored TSA agent to find a rogue yogurt container. The airport’s other terminals have been rebuilt: first the terminals that serve a motley assortment of foreign airlines, then American’s complex, and then JetBlue’s. If LOT Polish Airlines gets to use a terminal that’s not an embarrassment to New York City, why can’t one of the airport’s hub carriers (and now the largest airline in the world) have one that’s somewhere above Soviet bloc standards?
Nowhere is David Paterson’s impossible election situation better illustrated than in the Google results for his name (left). His campaign’s site is the seventh hit for “David Paterson,” well below several negative pages. Add search engine optimization to the long list of things that New York State’s elected officials can’t seem to get right.
At the top of his results page are two news articles detailing his latest scandal (in which he apparently contacted a woman who lodged a domestic abuse complaint against his aide).
Below those news headlines are Paterson’s Wikipedia article, the last section of which documents his moribund gubernatorial campaign, and his state government website. Then come two headlines from the Huffington Post, one questioning whether Paterson will resign and another announcing the resignation of the aide involved in the domestic dispute.
Finally, right before Paterson’s campaign website comes a Business Insider article about the rumors that circulated in Albany over the New York Times’s investigation into the governor’s aides.
Things do not look good for David Paterson.
The G.W.B. doesn’t disappoint. It’s really big—the roadway is almost a mile long and is suspended more than 200 feet above the surface of the Hudson River—but it’s also digestible. Walking across it doesn’t take terribly long, and it’s actually a bit easier than the walk across the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridges, since the deck links a high point in New Jersey to a high point in Manhattan.
The day that I took this walk, the south sidewalk was closed, so I used the walkway on the north side of the bridge. The natural scenery up the river is just as magnificent as the man-made scenery downriver.
From the metro area that gives us such names as Hoboken, Weehawken, Hackensack*, Harsimus Cove and Throgs Neck, comes Yonkers, which sits across the city line from the Bronx. It’s visible from the bridge.
The Cloisters, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sits on the top of a hill in Fort Tryon Park at the very northern tip of Manhattan. Its tower pokes through the trees in this photo. Below it, just above the shoreline, is Robert Moses’s Henry Hudson Parkway. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, the construction of the Henry Hudson Parkway was where Moses went from arrogant-but-generally-good to essentially maniacal (but there were signs earlier, of course).
The views of Midtown are as good as ever, of course. The scale of the Empire State Building is, I think, best appreciated from this distance, where it still overpowers just about everything else.
As we cross over the Manhattan shoreline on the bridge, we can see railroad tracks below us. These were originally built by the New York Central to gain access to the West Side (its Grand Central Terminal is on the East Side). Now they’re owned by Amtrak, which uses them for trains to Albany and Chicago. These tracks and the environment around them in the early 20th century inspired Robert Moses to pursue public works in the first place. When he built Riverside Park and the Henry Hudson Parkway, the tracks were the source of much of his funding, part of which came directly from the New York Central and another chunk of which came from Federal funds earmarked for the elimination of railroad grade crossings.
Upon arriving in Manhattan, we’re greeted by the sight of the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal (in the foreground). Behind it are residential towers that are located directly on top of the Cross-Manhattan Expressway segment of I-95.
And now, a final view of the bridge.
The tour is over. The A train whisks me back downtown, and safely home to Park Slope.