While often the first experience of America for contemporary visitors and immigrants, airports provide ambivalent gateways to American cities. Sometimes monumental in architecture, like earlier railroad stations, they have struggled to keep pace with the ever-changing demands of technology and consumption, hence airports embody piecemeal constructions of old and new terminals. Chicago’s O’Hare, the nation’s busiest airport, serves as many as 75 million passengers annually. Moreover, airports must provide industrial and commercial services and aviation maintenance, as well as passenger services within a competitive national market.

Aviation’s rapid postwar development eclipsed models that had envisioned municipalities and neighborhoods with their own airports, combining speed with accessibility. New York City’s state-of-the-art La Guardia Field, for example, opened in 1940, but reached near capacity in 1941. Hence, the city built Idlewild Airport (later JFK) on a site six times as large by 1947. Here, individual airline buildings by Eero Saarinen (TWA), Skidmore Owings Merrill and others created a congested “architectural zoo,” with growing surface transportation problems. The port authority subsequently took over and expanded the 1929 Newark Airport, while smaller airports and heliports contributed to dense transportation webs.

Given corporate competition and complex flight linkages, for most people airports have become less sanctuaries of leisure travel and more calvaries of transfer and delay— notorious for travelers grounded by weather and strikes. Yet, terminals struggle with design identity, efficiency and service; hence, Helmut Jahn’s recent United Terminal at O’Hare must function beyond its beauty. New airports have moved further out to function as inter-urban centers (Dallas-Fort Worth) or multiservice nodes, but complaints also faced Denver’s new airport, whose design echoes the Rockies, because of the expensive ride into town. Similarly, despite Saarinen’s soaring Dulles terminal, outside Washington members of Congress continually expand the convenient National (Ronald Reagan) Airport.

Cities, airlines and consumers are all players in creating and changing these urban spaces. Connections, especially through hub airlines or markets opened by competing airlines, facilitate tourism and business; hence, governments compete with expensive concessions. Geography also plays a role—beside Chicago’s centrality, Los Angeles International (LAX) and San Francisco International (SFI) have become Pacific gateways and New York offers multiple connections to Europe, as Miami does for Latin America. Intermediate hubs like Denver, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Houston have transformed location and corporate ties into power.

Despite their economic centrality, airports as public monuments are rarely seen from outside except at drop-off and pick-up points. Instead, scant expressions of local identity rely on interiors, constrained by needs of movement and security—a major concern exacerbated by terrorism since the 1980s. Southwest motifs may distinguish Albuquerque from the images of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, but many airports become “non-places,” recalling the facelessness of suburbs. Interior services, such as stores, restaurants, etc., may emphasize the local, for example, sourdough in San Francisco, lobster in Boston, but fast foods also snare family travelers. In the 1990s, however, revisions of the Pittsburgh airport to include an active mall have sparked interest in the airport as a destination that may transform the future.