The airport was to be a driver and symbol of the whole region’s evolution. “Planners hope the terminal, with its vaulted ceilings and driverless underground trains, will complete an image transformation begun decades ago,” the Times story said. “Once known as a gritty old steel town of blue-collar workers, Pittsburgh has become a commercial center of office towers and high-technology industries.” That reinvention has continued apace in the 33 years since the terminal opened. But even as a tech, robotics, and health care hub, the area has three-fourths the population that it did in 1970. And no place was a worse reminder of what Pittsburgh had lost than this airport 20 minutes west of downtown…
As a major airline’s biggest hub, Pittsburgh would be taking a piece out of millions of travelers who weren’t even staying in Pittsburgh, and it would also get a tourist boom from people who suddenly had an ultra-easy way of visiting. Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, USAir was running 542 daily flights in or out of Pittsburgh. As airline-airport relationships go, this was a huge one. (Today, for example, Delta peaks with about 330 daily flights leaving Minneapolis, its No. 2 city.)…
But the oversized airport was a bleak metaphor for a city that was once more bustling and then got let down—first by the shriveling of the steel business, then by USAir itself. The cavernous, quiet terminal created a bad feeling upon landing at home, like you had just entered a place that wasn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t a good way to be welcomed to a city, whether you lived there or not.
It can’t be overstated how much the point of the new airport is to simply move Pittsburgh past this corporate pantsing by US Airways. Yeah, there are practical logistics reasons for an update. As the airport authority chairman said in announcing the project back in 2017, airlines would face lower costs, and the facility would be “very efficient and modern.” But then he got to the point: “And, finally, this is most important for me, the people of Pittsburgh finally get an airport that is built for them, and not USAir.”…
A major city needs a decent airport. It offers travel opportunities to residents and businesses. It connects a place to other places. It is what people see when they arrive in or leave a city.
Can an airport be an economic engine on its own? Pittsburgh is a smaller big city. According to Wikipedia, it is the 67th largest city in the United States with over 307,000 residents and it is the 28th largest metropolitan area. How much air traffic can be expected to go through an airport in such a city?
The story of this airport seems tied up with the fate of the city. It once thought it could be an airline hub. It has a proud history of industry. But the world changed: industry jobs went elsewhere, the airline industry changed, and the large airport did not live up to its potential.
Having effective and inspiring infrastructure is helpful in many ways. It enables other important activity. Pittsburgh may not have a large airline hub or a standalone economic powerhouse but perhaps it now has an airport that serves the region well for decades.
Legally Sociable 