Ever hear of the East Side Airline Terminal in New York City—an old bus terminal that shuttled passengers out to the airports (La Guardia and JFK)? It’s across from Grand Central Terminal. Or was. Kind of.

Here’s a photo from a great blog post on the building:

It was a modern, tastefully designed facility and it also succeeded in improving the traffic and passenger experience:

As with the former terminal, here customers could buy their tickets, check their luggage, and board one of the 100 buses which made a total of 550 trips to the airport each day.  The bus garage was below ground, while on the roof was parking for 300 automobiles.  Inside, according to The New York Times, “The main portion of the building is the second-floor rotunda, a vast and pleasantly colored hall (bluish green and tomato red) filled with hard wooden waiting-room benches and lined by the check-in and ticket counters of the ten United States lines.”…

The estimate that the East Side Airline Terminal would serve 7,000 passengers daily fell far short.  Eight months after its opening, on July 18, 1954, The New York Times reported, “Nearly 10,000 travelers a day are processed by the airline offices in the First Avenue air depot.”  The article said that the results of the first half year of operation “are gratifying to nearly everyone concerned.”

But it wasn’t to last. An article from 1986 in the New York Times explains what happened to the structure, following its closure as a bus terminal, as the idea of urban airport bus terminals slowly became obsolete. The developer was, at that moment, “reconstructing a major portion of the terminal building as offices and pierced it with columns to support the condominium above.” (There’s also some interesting stuff in the article about the zoning updates that made a mixed-use (offices) condo building possible in this part of the city.)

That condo building is this:

And the altered but recognizable terminal, now the condo building’s base, is this:

If not for the contemporaneous article, I would have thought the new building’s base merely nodded to the old one in terms of design, since it doesn’t really look quite the same. But a building can take a lot of modification.

That’s why I find this so fun; it’s low-stakes detective work. It’s a little insight into what architects actually do. Good stuff.

Related Reading:

Raising the Roof

Ghost Buildings

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #28

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