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Now departing, Terminal 2
The last days of a gleaming gateway
Peter Kuitenbrouwer
National Post
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Peter King worked at Terminal 2 in 1972, the year it opened, unloading luggage from the Air Canada jets as a Christmas job. He will work here when it closes in January, to say one last prayer for the employees and the passengers.
"It's a bittersweet thing, if you want to call it that," says Mr. King, who seven years ago left a long career with Air Canada to become an evangelical chaplain at the Aviation Interfaith Ministry, ministering to the faithful in the T2 chapel. "You think of all the experiences you had."
Mr. King's chapel sits behind long banks of abandoned check-in counters, which Air Canada deserted a few years ago; WestJet then took them over, but left last year for Terminal 3.
I drifted into the chapel yesterday, on a search for meaning in all this. On Jan. 30, Air Canada will fly its last U.S.-bound jet out of Terminal 2, and the terminal, now used only for flights to the U.S., will end its days as Toronto's gateway to America. The next day, all cross-border Air Canada flights will leave from the new Pier F at the new Terminal 1.
From then on Pearson will have just two terminals: No. 1 and No. 3.
I went to Terminal 2 yesterday expecting to find the place looking shabby, rundown, ready for retirement. However, Terminal 2 (a huge building; it took me six minutes to walk its length) gleams like new.
The bathroom counters are marble, with motion-sensor sinks.
The counters at Avis, Hertz, Budget and Thrifty, already closed down, are gleaming green granite. Huge windows pour light into waiting areas decorated in clean new carpets, thriving plants and padded chairs.
"Just yesterday," writes Mr. King in the chaplaincy newsletter, "so it seems to us younger baby boomers, Pearson's T2 first welcomed curious and excited passengers to its departure lounges and linear plethora of gates."
Joshua, a volunteer at the Travellers' Aid booth, just shrugs. "That is the construction policy in Canada," he says. "Every building outlives its usefulness."
These decisions are expensive: to pay for the new T1 and the demolition of T2, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority will raise the Airport Improvement Fee, which every passenger pays to use the place, from $15 to $20 on Jan. 1. To pay for the $4.4-billion T1, the GTAA already charges airlines the highest landing fees on earth.
We can hope, at least, that they've built a more spacious waiting area at T1 for passengers clearing U.S. Customs; anyone who's suffered the early-morning lineups at T2 on a U.S.-bound Air Canada flight knows of what I speak.
Alas, the new terminal does not allot more space for baggage sorting, according to Air Canada baggage handler John Ardito.
Mr. Ardito tells me he worked six months at the new T1 and requested a transfer back to T2. The baggage rooms at T1 are smaller, and handlers can only work one side of the baggage belts, he says; handlers have to leave golf bags and other off-size luggage outdoors for delivery to the aircraft.
"It's good for the passengers but it's not really worker-friendly," he says.
Some are looking forward to the new terminal.
At the Travelstore I meet Elzbieta Balaga, who has worked at T2 for 7 1/2 years.
"The air is very hot in this terminal," she says. "There, they have good filters and high ceilings. I like it. It's new, it's nice."
Yesterday I ate a last desultory bowl of clam chowder at the deserted Second City Alumni Bar & Grill while watching a panel on TSN discuss the trade of hockey player Chris Pronger, and pondered our city's short attention span with its architecture.
It's not that I will miss T2, exactly. It hasn't even had time to become kitsch.
But I do wonder at the wisdom of demolishing perfectly good buildings.
"Our past experiences are never wasted in God's divine plan," says Mr. King, and I guess that's the best explanation we are liable to get.