Milestone Reached in $8B NYC LaGuardia Airport Revamp

Construction continues on $8-billion airport redevelopment. Photo courtesy of Skanska-Walsh

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), announced on June 10 a "significant milestone" in the $8-billion LaGuardia International Airport redevelopment program—completion of the 850,000-sq-ft headhouse for the Queens, N.Y. facility's $4-billion new Terminal B.

The new headhouse is the central entry point for travelers flying out of Terminal B, with seamless integration to passenger concourses and gates, a new parking garage, and a Central Hall that connects to Terminal C and the planned future AirTrain.

Completion of the headhouse indicates that the Terminal B project is about 80% complete, said the Port Authority.

The 4-level building features 60-ft-tall ceilings and dual pedestrian bridges that connect it to Terminal B’s two island concourses. The 420-ft-long bridges span 65 ft over active aircraft taxi lanes.

The first floor includes a new ground transportation center for arrivals, followed by the arrivals hall and baggage claim on level two, and check-in on level three. The fourth floor features shops, restaurants and other customer amenities, and the concourse bridges.

Rick Cotton, agency executive director, credited project team companies and union construction workers "who worked through the pandemic to deliver this extraordinary building on time and on budget," pointing to the project as a boost to "the region’s potential for a strong economic recovery."

The redevelopment, begun in 2016, is the largest public-private-partnership (P3) in U.S. aviation history. The concessionaire LaGuardia Gateway Partners includes firms Meridiam, Skanska, Vantage Airport Group and JLC Infrastructure as developer and equity investors; and the joint-venture design-build team of Skanska-Walsh, with designers HOK and WSP USA.

Project officials said this piece of the $8-billion program was not affected schedule-wise by the pandemic.

In addition to the headhouse opening, Skanska-Walsh will complete construction of 17 new roadway bridges, more than eight miles of new roadways, and nearly two miles of new taxiway.

Project officials say the next milestone is the opening of 7 out of 17 new gates in the western concourse later this year.

The entire airport project is slated to complete by the fall of 2022.

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

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