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01/08/2006: "Stroll: YYZ"
This week, the airport. Terminal 2 always meant Air Canada and Nova Scotia to me. We would sometimes drive all the way from Windsor to Pearson just to pick somebody up. Before Terminal 3, and new Terminal 1, T2 was the place we went most, and the biggest. Old round Terminal 1 was for international flights, and windsor bound international people would usually fly into Detroit's Metro Airport for pickup, so we didn't see T1 too much. I haven't been to Detroit Metro in a long, long time, but I think it had a huge expansion in recent years -- their international terminal used to be a huge concrete brutalist thing, with those huge 1970s hanging hooked rugs on the wall. I do remember the rugs were gone last time I was there. I wonder what they did with them. Detroit's airport was never as special a trip as was YYZ -- and apart from their early song "Working Man", Rush's "YYZ" is their only other song I remotely approve of.
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Toronto's Lester B. Pearson Airport is our only true international port, sprawling into the high plains of Mississauga. It's a place half in Toronto, half in some distant land where the grip that familiar places like Yonge, Spadina or Honest Ed's have on us slowly loosen as watches are changed to reflect new time zones and exotic subway systems are anticipated.
New Terminal 1 gleams and its ceilings soar to the sky like the airplanes that taxi away from its gates. I'm sure, given time, we'll grow to love it, but the old Terminal 1 is a hard act to follow. When opened in 1964, "Aeroquay One" was this city's bold jump into the jet age. Circular in design, with a parking garage in the middle, passengers could be whisked from Pan Am to Plymouth in two minutes. Though rendered inefficient by increased passenger volume, an inability to expand and the spectre of terror that lurks in the corners of our once utopian air terminals, it was celebrated in aviation and architectural circles alike. Author Arthur Hailey even wrote his blockbuster potboiler Airport after getting a tour by his friend, T1 architect John C. Parkin.
Once, when dropping off a former girlfriend embarking on one of those awful Birkenstock-and-backpack tours of Europe people seem to enjoy, we passed the time by sneaking up automobile ramps to the open roof of the centre garage. Alone in the dark high above the runways, feeling like we shouldn't be there, the terrific sound of the jets moved the hair on our arms as we stood and watched like all those people did when The Beatles arrived at JFK.
Dowdy Terminal 2 -- originally a freight terminal but converted for passenger use in 1968 -- seems endlessly long but was the first place I saw moving sidewalks. Its squat, brutalist parking garage is like a futuristic ruin, with vegetation growing over the edges and guardrails that light up from within.
The international arrivals section at Terminal 3 is all theatre. Past customs, passengers are suddenly alone on a platform that slopes down in three directions, surrounded by a few hundred faces with expressions that all say, "You're not the one I'm waiting for." When loved ones are finally spotted, people charge up the ramp where they hug, kiss and cry before moving on in a happy huddle. It makes waiting there a pleasure, and a lovely last moment of strangeness before returning to the normal routine of the city.
