Seeing Beauty Right in Front of You

December 6, 2021 12:47 PM

At Block Club Chicago, Ariel Parrella-Aureli covers Allison Robicelli's recent overnight stay at O'Hare International Airport.
posted by Ipsifendus (31 comments total)

I admire how she finds fun in that desolate hellscape.
posted by doctornemo at 1:28 PM on December 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

"Robicelli [...] was on her way home to Baltimore Saturday after a trip to Palm Springs"

Okay so now that I’m intimately acquainted with every single corner of O’Hare, here’s my official terminal ranking from worst to best:
-5
-2
-1
-3

How exactly did she visit Terminal 5?
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:45 PM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

It always surprises me when a place like that is so empty. I'd expect that there would be at least some flights arriving and departing most all hours of the day. I had a late flight in SFO once (maybe 10:30pm), and could barely find a sole to assist when I had a question.

Yes, Terminal 4 no longer exists...
posted by hydra77 at 1:47 PM on December 6, 2021

That sounds like it would rule. It also has a faintly forbidden aspect, as if posting it breaks some sort of unwritten security rule that will get her randomly searched on her next flight. But then I am a little paranoid. Still, I am very fond of seeing dawn in an airport. (Less fond of how there's already a line forming for any place that serves coffee.)

I had to spend the night in Tel Aviv airport once because my flight was so early that I could only get a ride the night before, and, well, that was a total absence of fun. I had to sit with my stuff because they take unattended luggage mighty seriously there. I did have a book to read, but it was grimdark, and it was before the time of Kindle. The only interesting thing I observed was how a security guy came to check the nearby trash can every twenty minutes. Like I say, mighty serious.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:11 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

When I laid on my back in the Rotunda, it literally took my breath away,” Robicelli said. “It’s beautiful from the side but there is an illusion up there. You don’t see it unless you are flat on your back in the middle of the Rotunda. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my entire life.”

Well if that’s isn’t just the best I don’t know what is.
posted by zenon at 2:14 PM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

When I was a teenager (pre-2001) I went to PDX sometimes in the evenings for a quiet place to hang out. I really miss doing that.
posted by curious nu at 2:17 PM on December 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also, I remember now how I took a tiny commuter flight that was over six hours late -- because there was just the one plane, and it was going back and forth like a van -- and found how spooky the Nashville airport was around 1:30 am. They had actually stopped dispensing aviation fuel at the main airport, and so all of us had to troop onto the plane and get ferried over to the general aviation area and go into the private airport to wait for departure.

Naturally, that's where all the stars who come to play Nashville arrive. It was like a little hotel lobby, just for us, all done up for Christmas. There were couches; the TVs were big but for humans, and you could change them to whatever you wanted. The bathroom was nice and had flowers and all, and during the day we could have had some coffee, but as it was, we just tried not to fall asleep.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:18 PM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

By coincidence, I suppose, in the Onion today (see the quote by the 'shame strategist')
posted by torii hugger at 2:20 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is fun! I love airports. But, I've never spent a night in one when not also so utterly exhausted that I couldn't really enjoy it. I spent 36 hours in Montreal once. It was the opposite of empty, and not any fun. But, I remain friends with two of the people who banded together as we tried to find some way to escape. (Less of an issue for me, who didn't need a visa to leave the airport. But, taking the bus into town when you might get a new flight any minute didn't seem worth it. At least for the first ten hours. After that, I was incapable of having fun.)

I'd love to hear other's favorite airports. My vote for best food in the middle of the night: Sheremetyevo. Best video games in the middle of the night: Rochester. Best place to make a fort out of furniture and actually sleep: Denver, upper floors.
posted by eotvos at 2:21 PM on December 6, 2021

"You don’t see it unless you are flat on your back in the middle of the Rotunda. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my entire life.”

The Gertrude Kerbis*-designed ORD Rotunda in Terminal 3 is an endangered piece of jet-age architecture and probably won't survive like Sarrinen's TWA terminal at JFK did. Pretty dismal.

Kerbis was a badass architect and snuck into Taliesin through a bathroom window because she thought it looked cool
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:34 PM on December 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

I've had to use this site far too often:
https://www.sleepinginairports.net/
posted by doctornemo at 2:56 PM on December 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

I got stuck in DCA overnight (storms, so I wasn't the only one stuck and thus also all hotels were full at least an hour before our flight decided to give up and taxi back to the gate) and all that happened was security coming 'round to kick everyone out after midnight and make us sit on the curb by the luggage trolleys and cockroaches.

I would have done nearly anything to be inside ORD at the time.

Fuck DCA.
posted by aramaic at 3:02 PM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

I have spent the night in JFK and DIA and vastly prefer the latter.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:42 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'd expect that there would be at least some flights arriving and departing most all hours of the day.

I arrived into terminal 1 (C gates) at 9pm last week and it was 100% empty. Every shop and restaurant was closed. The international terminal is probably more used to having late night flights. A friend recently had to pick someone up at ORD terminal 5 and I was so confused, until she explained that Southwest is now flying domestic into terminal 5 and the flight had been delayed until 2am.

I’ve found that most airports keep a bar, maybe a shop, open until the last flight departs, even if it’s late and even at tiny airports. But airports don’t keep anything open for the last arriving flight since people aren’t usually looking to hang about. ORD is used to having people hanging about due to weather delays so they must have a “let them stay” policy.

ORD is my home airport and I have lots of strong feelings about it. I guess the reason I like it is because I know where everything is and feel like I know the “secrets” ( I recognized the dimly lit “service” hallway she found — it is also a good place to find less crowded bathrooms or get some peace to make a call). Also, United’s lighted tunnel between B and C gates is my happy place. I will admit, ORD is pretty dirty so I might be tempted to stay awake to stay off that floor.
posted by Bunglegirl at 5:43 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've slept in a lot of airports but I can't remember if I have slept in ORD. I just about got hypothermia in de Gaulle one time -- the area where I found a bench to lay on was basically unheated, and people kept running cleaning equipment right next to me. That was a long night.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:18 PM on December 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

It always surprises me when a place like that is so empty. I'd expect that there would be at least some flights arriving and departing most all hours of the day.

A decade and a half ago I had to pay a brief work visit to Dawson City in the Yukon Territory. Dawson had a population of a little over a thousand people at the time, so I had to fly from Vancouver via Whitehorse, which was perhaps 20,000 people.

One flight a day each way on the Whitehorse to Dawson run (and I think two each way daily from Vancouver) does not make for really flexible scheduling. Whitehorse, however, actually has a sizeable airport (named, incidentally, for Erik Nielsen, a prominent former politician and brother to Leslie Nielsen). I’d spent a night in Whitehorse on the way north and a second night in Dawson, so I was happy to find a connecting flight on the way south again.

My flight from Dawson landed at maybe 11:00 AM. My flight onward was 5:30 PM or thereabouts and I figured rather than taxi into Whitehorse to sit in a restaurant for a few hours, I would hang out at the airport. I had a DVD-R drive and a boxed set of Deadwood, so I was set.

Turns out the only flights after the lunchtime arrival from Dawson were the Vancouver flights that evening. The airport shut down entirely around noon — ticket counters were vacant, the bookstore and cafe closed up, and the caretaker with the floor polisher eyed me curiously every time he went past.

I’ve been in a lot of airports in my life. I am rarely the only passenger in the bolting.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:30 PM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

OMG doctornemo, that sleepinginairports site is gold. Wish it existed decades ago when I ended up sleeping on the floor of a phone booth in the Vienna airport, and only discovered the next morning there was one bank of chairs without arms, hidden around a corner less than 100 yards away.
posted by PhineasGage at 7:38 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

The thing I liked so much about the account is not all the cool stuff she found (I've seen enough of O'Hare to last me a long, long time), but the sheer joy she took in her "Night at the Museum" adventure.
posted by adamg at 7:47 PM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

I got stuck overnight at Narita once when the whole place got snowed in. I spent the better part of 24 hours in the JAL/Qantas lounge, which was about the only place in the airport which didn’t run out of food and drinks. It was not a harrowing ordeal.

A few years later I got stuck for way too long at Heydar Aliyev airport. The night before I flew in the government changed the rules for entry visas but didn’t bother telling any of the airlines. The transit area was full of stranded passengers. Immigration officials confiscated all of our passports. They would only return them to passengers who had tickets to other countries… Which could not be purchased without passports. It took forever to sort out but eventually I was able to buy a one-way ticket to Istanbul on a flight which was already open for checkin. The airport was dull and uncomfortable and everything was hideously expensive. I would not care to repeat the experience.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 11:15 PM on December 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

I used to have so many opinions on airports. The ones with the best food, the best places to nap, the most beautiful and the most interesting. It's all a decade out of date now, and generally applies to the international terminals. Madrid is beautiful and spacious. Boston has good restaurants. Amsterdam is crowded. Reykjavik is pretty and human scale. San Jose is utilitarian. San Francisco is extravagant but not comfortable. Dakar is chaos. Heathrow is expensive. Portland is low and crowded, but that carpet! Seattle is comfortable and has good food. Lisbon is close enough to the city to go on a walk during a layover. Paris is best not mentioned. Dulles we do not speak of, but once you are in the international terminal, it's okay.

In Madrid, the ceiling beams are colored in a spectrum, and the gates have a color, so you can see down the building to where your gate is by the gradient. It's just over 1000 steps from end to end.

Chicago is indeed great for exploring.
posted by Nothing at 3:39 AM on December 7, 2021 [6 favorites]

I've seen enough of O'Hare to last me a long, long time

Me too. Enough so that when she got to "there’s an art piece on the ceiling connecting terminal 1 and the concourse," Rhapsody in Blue immediately began playing in my head and now it won't leave. So. Thanks for that.
posted by The Bellman at 6:47 AM on December 7, 2021 [8 favorites]

"The moving walkway is now ending"
posted by crazy_yeti at 6:53 AM on December 7, 2021 [7 favorites]

My knowledge too is mostly out of date, but I will share my favorite airport secret in case it is still helpful:

If you have an international connection in Heathrow that takes you to a different terminal, if you follow the obvious signs you will end up going out of security and have to go back in, and it will take forever. This can leave you well and truly fucked since British Air has no problem scheduling sub-hour layovers, and the security personnel have similarly no qualms about lying that you'll definitely make your flight so no you can't cut ahead. So ignore those signs and find an elevator to go to whatever sub-level it says has public pedestrian access (-4 I think, but it might be -2). You're in for a long walk with only occasional people-movers (bonus for introverts: you may literally see no one else the whole walk), but you won't have left the secured area, and you will actually make your connection. Probably anyway (it is a really long walk).
posted by solotoro at 8:24 AM on December 7, 2021 [7 favorites]

That was so much fun! My only overnight in airport stories are either depressing or bizarre for reasons that had nothing to do with the building, so I really enjoyed this. And whoever came up with that range of trivia questions was bananas.

The Gertrude Kerbis*-designed ORD Rotunda in Terminal 3 is an endangered piece of jet-age architecture and probably won't survive like Sarrinen's TWA terminal at JFK did. Pretty dismal.

That's so beautiful - I hope enough people speak up to find a way to save it.

I've never been there, but there are a lot of stories that Denver's airport is haunted.
posted by Mchelly at 8:38 AM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Dakar is chaos.

The new airport way out in the countryside is quite pleasant, I hope it's survived the Covid upheaval. I've only heard grim stories about the old one closer to town.

I had to spend most of a night in JFK terminal 1 a few years ago (international arrival at 11:30 pm, next flight home at 6:30 am the next morning). Awful. Spent most of it slumped over, half awake, at a cafeteria-style table in the middle of a closed food court. You'd think mega-airports would have amenities in the middle of the night, but no. (Your mileage may vary with lounge access.)

I'm still flummoxed at the late opening times of basic restaurants at MSP. So many flights leaving at 6 am, almost nothing but the McDonald's auto-ordering screen open at that hour. (This observation is also pre-Covid, but still valid today.)
posted by gimonca at 9:41 AM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

I haven’t been through O’Hare in fifteen years following my discovery that it was the gatehouse of hell. Maybe it’s better now. The thing that struck me most was that all four terminals had exactly the same shops and restaurants with a very few exceptions. It was like a spatial version of Groundhog Day or like walking a treadmill.

The article was interesting and it is fun to be in a usually-busy place when there is no one else around. That’s why I used to try to go someplace when the Stupidbowl was being played.

In re MSP, I am not surprised nothing is open early. Even later, they have “special” restaurants that serve bad-airport versions of foods that are acceptable elsewhere. For instance, the French Meadow kiosk has cardboard pastries, but the mother ship still makes excellent stuff. Inexplicable.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 10:41 AM on December 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

"It always surprises me when a place like that is so empty. I'd expect that there would be at least some flights arriving and departing most all hours of the day."

I mean, there are, but the airport is ginormous so it seems super-empty. This is why I preferentially fly red-eyes into O'Hare, because it's such a better experience at 2 a.m., where your baggage gets to the carousel quickly, you can always find somewhere to sit, and there's zero traffic on the Tri-State. (Also every cabbie I've ever had at 2 a.m. is super-friendly and chill, I guess because they're not spending six hours a day in rush-hour traffic, and also the tips are great at 2 a.m.)

And planes are still landing every 30 seconds all night long at O'Hare, they're just disproportionately cargo overnight. On a clear night in the winter when I can't sleep, when it's frigid and cloudless and the sky is sparklingly clear, sometimes I like to go outside and look towards the Lake (I live about four miles from it) and look at the cargo jets circling, waiting for their turn to land.

(Jets are so much QUIETER than they were 30 years ago! I used to be able hear them coming in at night no matter what flight path they took, but now they pretty much have to go right over my house for me to hear them, which they only do when the wind is coming from a particular direction.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:16 PM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

(Lest I come off as a sociopath who goes out in subfreezing temperatures to watch planes, I actually GO outside to look at the stars, I just ENJOY watching the ballet of the jets over the Lake and knowing there are other humans awake up there, enjoying the peaceful night, while I'm out there.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:20 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

At one point maybe a decade ago, 20% of the delays in the entire US air traffic control system were for flights originating or ending at O'Hare. I truly admire anyone who is able to see it as anything other than the hellmouth. The only good thing I have to say is that the deep dish pizza is good. I mean, all ginormous airports will drive you crazy in one way or another. But O'Hare is unique in that its runways are underprovisioned for instrument landings, you always have to change terminals, the terminals are so long, and the bars are extortionate ($15 for a regular Goose Island beer, no prices on the menu). No question it is the worst airport in the entire United States. I will pay hundreds of dollars and hours of time to avoid it. One of my colleagues lives in Chicago and thinks it's great, though.
posted by wnissen at 2:16 PM on December 7, 2021

I have spent a LOT of time in north american airports and it got a lot more tolerable when I started playing Ingress. it took me a couple of years and a LOT of walking to tag all the portals in Atlanta.

Another REALLY good source of portals in an airport, somewhat unexpectedly, was in St Louis.

To my everlasting shame, Toronto's portal layout is relatively shit.
posted by hearthpig at 5:16 PM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

The article was interesting and it is fun to be in a usually-busy place when there is no one else around. That’s why I used to try to go someplace when the Stupidbowl was being played.

My wife and I live in a house that is basically impossible to find without either a carefully annotated map or real-time directions or both. (I think every time we have ever ordered delivery food, thirty-five minutes after we order there is a plaintive call from a delivery person who is sitting helpless half a block away.) There are never trick-or-treaters on Halloween. As such, October 31 is an evening like any other.

A few years ago this chanced to be the night we stopped by IKEA to pick something up. Let me tell you now: if you want to see a normally fairly crowded place near empty, there is no need to sit overnight in the departures lounge of a major airport. IKEA at 7:30 PM on Halloween will show you more staff than there are shoppers. (I repeated the experiment a few years later with the same results.)
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:39 AM on December 9, 2021 [1 favorite]