The Starbucks salted caramel cream cold brew is a difficult drink to get right. You would think it’d be easy—cold brew, cold foam, a few spritzes of caramel, a dash of salt—but of the maybe sixty Starbucks salted caramel cream cold brews that I’ve had, only one truly stands out as an excellent, perhaps even Platonic, example of the form. This Starbucks salted caramel cream cold brew had caramel not only in the cold brew itself, but also mixed into the cold foam, rendering the entire drinking experience one of smooth, sweet saltiness. Usually, I order the salted caramel cream cold brew and mostly just kind of scoop the foam off with the lid. This one? I drank the whole thing. I was at LaGuardia.
I wasn’t there to go anywhere, just to visit. I like to see the newest, hottest buildings, and I’d heard that this was one of them. I also may have been persuaded by an editor to make the trek. So on a random Tuesday, a few days after arriving from Europe through JFK, which I almost always choose over LGA when I can, I drove out. It took me forty-five minutes of winding my way through Waze-directed streets, forty-five minutes I spent thinking about every time I’ve gone to LGA before. There was the time that I took my future ex-husband to New York City for the first time and we landed, late at night, to low ceilings and shitty food options before taking a taxi that made both of us sick, to Crown Heights, which felt alarmingly far away. There was the time I meant to fly into JFK but got confused and flew into LGA, wondering how it was that such a prominent port of entry could feel just so utterly grungy. But then there was also the time, more recently, when I landed at LGA because, for some reason, I couldn’t get a flight into JFK. I was surprised by Terminal B’s high ceilings and lots of open space and large windows (the handiwork of megafirm HOK) and signs gesturing toward very fun new food options aka a whole new LGA. Was it possible, I wondered, that LaGuardia could supplant JFK as New York City’s best airport?
After a $4 billion renovation, Terminal C opened in June. It was designed by Gensler, which has its hands in seemingly everything, and Corgan, a massive office I’d never heard of. Both Terminal B and C renovations were spearheaded by the now-disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who, at the January ribbon-cutting of Terminal B, drew attention to himself and away from our nondisgraced current governor, who actually had a lot to do with it. The general narrative is that these two terminals will transform LaGuardia from what President Joe Biden called “a third-world country” aesthetic in 2014 (apparently before we replaced that term) into a “world-class” present.
I wanted to see both terminals but was more excited about the newer C. So I followed signs to that terminal and pulled into the parking lot, which required a lot of turns to reach. I was greeted by an attendant who said that the parking lot was full, and that I had to go to Terminal B and then take a bus back to Terminal C. “I’m just here to review the building,” I said. “Tell them they need better parking,” he said. So, I’m telling them, they need better parking. Or better public transport, although apparently there’s a new bus—the M60 or the newly free Q70, which goes from the airport to Roosevelt Avenue in under 10 minutes. (Cuomo’s plan to build an AirTrain to LGA went nowhere.) There’s currently no easy single-method way to get there, just a cobbled-together mix of buses and subways and lots and lots of walking. Of course, cars are bad and it is bad that I drove mine, but I wanted some comfort. I figured out how to get to the Terminal B parking garage and found a spot on the sixth floor, took a massive elevator down to the ground floor, waited for a bus, and got to Terminal C. At some point I wondered if I should have asked for an official tour and remembered the one that I took with David Rockwell of Rockwell Group and a bunch of people from Gensler when the new JFK Terminal 5 opened sixteen years ago. Rockwell had asked us what the number one thing people wanted when they got to the airport might be, and we all looked blankly, and then he said, “Food,” and of course it was, but none of us had wanted to admit it.
I had so much time to think about airports past because, really, no matter how amazing an airport is they are by necessity interstitial spaces, interstitial within the airport’s own essential interstitialness. As I made my way through the long corridor from the bus arrival place to Terminal C, I thought about just how much space there is in the world, and what global luxury means. Is it high ceilings? Is it a generous runway? Is it generous displays of art? I thought about my friend Greg Lindsay’s book Aerotropolis, which made the case, in 2011, for airports becoming in a sense new cities, for a hyperconnected global world. And I thought about a gig I did a few years ago, writing project descriptions for an SOM monograph, and how many airports I wrote about. “What’s the deal with airports?” I kept thinking. “What are they really for?”
This airport artwork sort of made me think about planes exploding. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to think about that.
I probably flew more during the pandemic than I should have. So far, I’ve had Covid twice. The first time I got it from a friend who’d flown; the second time I got it on an unventilated train from Prague to Vienna. But I remember the first time during the pandemic that I flew. I wore an N95 mask and a full-on face shield, and neither I nor my traveling companion got Covid. We barely snacked. I thought about the news pictures we all saw of people landing at New York City airports after the federal government basically recalled everyone or said they had to stay where they were. Sometimes I look up those images and wonder if that tightly compressed group of people is how so much early Covid got here. Fear is a powerful drug.
I got into Terminal C baggage claim. There was a sculpture, a series of sculptures maybe, by Virginia Overton, hanging from the ceiling. It reminded me of another sculpture, at JFK or maybe at LGA, that looked like a net full of broken airplane parts. My dad, who was with me at the time, pointed it out and at the same time pointed out how common it was for airport artwork to make you think about planes exploding. This one sort of made me think about planes exploding. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to think about that.
There were very high ceilings and a lot of light. I went up an escalator to the ticketing and check-in center. The terminal seemed to be very Delta, and very uncrowded, though this may have been because it was 1:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, which I guess is not a high-volume flight time. I walked around and tried to think about what I could say about this place. Mostly it seemed nice. I took a few notes—about one set of restrooms on the ground floor that had icons of toilets, not people, which I read as gender inclusivity, but then the other set of restrooms said “MEN” and “WOMEN” so so much for that; and that there is “some art” and that it was “pretty empty.” The structure is impressive; there are massive multistory columns and huge atrium-type sections that dare you to crane your neck over the ledge and look three stories down. It all feels very solid and new. I walked by the security section and tried to see past the security machines. A day later, my friend would fly out of LGA and tell me that, past security, there were more food options than there had been before. It seemed like all the enthusiasm was earned.
I tried to find something to do and that’s when I saw the Starbucks and waited in line with pilots and staff and ordered my salted caramel cream cold brew, which I drank while walking back to wait for the bus, which I took back to the parking lot and then exited. My one hour of parking cost $20. Again, cars are bad; I should have taken the train and then the bus and then another bus and then a different bus and train home. I drove back home and struggled to recall anything particularly architectural about New York’s newest “world-class” airport. Maybe that’s the point of airports though. No matter how amazing the architecture and how fitting the art and how high the ceilings and how new the security machines, they will always be sort of nothing spaces. They will never be visited just to be visited, and so the best airport, the best possible renovation, would be one that just makes everything work a little easier, so that we can drift into just being led from one Starbucks to another, one gate to the next. I am reminded sometimes of what airports used to be—spaces of glamour, of excitement, of enthusiasm for the Jet Age—and then I am reminded, by trying to find something to say, of what airports are now. They’re just way stations as we live our lives. Sometimes they have nice coffee.