Alistair Gordon
speaker
62 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Alistair Gordon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I can write a whole book about it, actually.
I was writing for the New York Times for about 20 years, and then I was with the Wall Street Journal and traveling a lot, in airports a lot. And I think it was in Singapore. It was four in the morning, some connecting flight back to L.A. or something was canceled. And I just had one of those airport freakouts completely melt down. Yeah.
I had to get to another plane and I missed it and it was four in the morning and my bag went into some, you know, labyrinth of doom. And I kind of went nuts and tried to go down, you know, the belt that brings the baggage up from below. Wait, you tried to go down the luggage conveyor belt? Yeah, this is pre-9-11, so they didn't shoot me. Nowadays, you'd be dead before you got near it.
You know, I'd been drinking 40 gallons of coffee and writing on a deadline and everything. So at that moment, I thought, well, who the fuck made this? How did this happen?
I'd gone to the New York Public Library and to the Air and Space Archives in Washington, just looking for sort of cultural background in airports. There was a ton of technical stuff, you know. There virtually was nothing that was just taking the airport as a cultural phenomenon or an artifact, whatever you want to call it.
So anyway, I started to just pull things together, did a bunch of articles, and then... an editor I was working with said, you know, there's a famous book on railroad stations, but I've never seen anything on airports. So that's kind of how it started. Then literally 10 years later, it took me that long to gather material. I interviewed hundreds of characters from around the world.
So it was sort of an attempt to humanize a place that seemed so inhuman to me.
What's the beginning of the story? That took a long time to figure out. It was Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh, flying into Paris.
Lindbergh was literally a barnstormer, right? So he's this guy who's an incredibly youthful, athletic, handsome American taking off from Long Island where he barely got over the trees.
And he comes in, and when he's trying to land, it's at night, and he couldn't believe that Bourget, Le Bourget, which was the first big urban airport in Paris, he couldn't believe that it was an airport because it looked too big. He thought it was a factory. He thought he was about to land at a factory or something. And it was this huge, you know, incredibly well-designed airport.
In terms of history of airport evolution, the Europeans were way ahead of Americans. In Europe, there was this sort of tradition of beautiful urbanistic railroad stations, and they kind of adapted that for their first airports. Most American airports were barns, you know, or hangars with nothing. Maybe there was a little room put aside in one of the hangars for passengers to sit and wait.
But the Ford Airport in Dearborn, Michigan, was the first that I could find. Comprehensively designed American airport. Had a terminal that was just for passengers. So you weren't in danger of being, you know, chopped in half by propellers and stuff. Was that happening? Were people getting chopped in half by propellers? Yeah, it was dangerous. Also, you know, there were so many crashes.
I mean, it was pretty horrible. You know, there was a good chance the plane was going to crash and you were dead. So people were very, very... nervous about flying.
I mean, basically, the first commercial air travel in America was the mail service because you could make money from the government carrying air mail. And passengers were almost like a second thought. Most of them in the beginning were salesmen, you know, who could beat out the guy taking the train to Detroit by flying there, but at a risk, at a huge risk, right?
I don't think many people, if they didn't have to fly, they didn't.
Congress was mainly Republican at that point. They didn't want anything to do with aviation. They thought it was dangerous, thought it was stupid.
Yeah, they felt it was a crazy thing that would go away. It was like a fad. They really didn't believe it. That's so funny. Yeah. It's so funny that like flying would be like a new progressive idea. Yeah, I know, I know.
He needed to rebuild the North Beach Airport, which is where LaGuardia is now. Most of that was from the federal government, but he, you know, pushed it through. I mean, he was very good at that. He was very bullheaded and just did it. There's a famous story of him. I think he bought a ticket on Pan Am to New York, and it said New York City.
And of course, New York City's main airport then was Newark Airport. Newark Airport's very old. And it was in those kind of wetlands in New Jersey, so they had a lot of room to spread out. So he arrives in Newark, New Jersey. with a ticket that said New York City. And he said, look, I'm the mayor of New York City. This is not New York City. Everybody knew it was obviously a publicity stunt.
So they flew him to Floyd Bennett Field, which was at the time New York City's main airport. And it was a disaster. I mean, Newark was the main airport, but in terms of New York City in New York State, the main airport was Floyd Bennett Field. It's still there. You can go out and see the you know, the hangars and everything's really cool.
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