Toronto Pearson Terminal 2 Farewell

[thenay]

Date of Release: Jan 24, 2007
Public Farewell Event
Sunday January 28, 2007
1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

On Sunday January 28th, the public is invited to Toronto Pearson International Airport, Terminal 2, for a Farewell Event to mark the end of Operations in Terminal 2. This will be your last opportunity to walk through the public areas of Terminal 2. A small photo display and a memory book will be available for people to share their memories of Terminal 2. This will be set up on the Departures level in the former Domestic/Rapid Air end of Terminal 2. A small memento will also be available.

Complimentary parking will be available at the Terminal 2 parking garage. Parking vouchers must be claimed at the GTAA display area.

Source: GTAA

 

[cacruden]

That's lame.....

Hey what they should do is give people the opportunity to do some Terminal 2 demolition (give a sledgehammer and allow you to knock holes in things) .... Maybe charge a nominal amount for the opportunity and give it to charity. Sure would allow anybody with pent-up fustrations to let some of it out :rollin

 

[bizorky]

^I'd be there for that!

 

[allabootmatt]

I call first in line to knock down the US Customs section.

 

[adma]

Terminal Two twilight--a thoughtful perspective.

Anyway, there's something poetically appropriate about Terminal Two and John Majhor biting the dust about the same time...

 

[unimaginative2]

Aren't they retaining the gates from the building as a holding area for passengers who check in at Terminal 1?

 

[interchange42]

Nope. Terminal 2 was originally to be knocked down in stages as new Terminal 1's Peir G was built, but a bit of a downturn in the growth of air travel since 9/11 has meant that Terminals 1 and 3 currently have all the space needed for current passenger loads, and they can take down all of Terminal 2 in one go. It will be much cheaper to do it that way too.

It may be another decade before Pier G opens.

just plane crazy 42

 

[dashingdan]

Glad to hear they're knocking the whole thing down. So long Terminals 1 and 2! Glad they're both history now.

 

[samsonyuen]

I kinda liked T1 for its kitschiness, but T2 was nothing to me. Glad it's gone! I also hope never to have a flight into/out of the Infield Terminal either, again!

 

[adma]

"Kitschiness" was never a word I'd have ascribed to Parkin's 1964 Terminal 1...

 

[Citywriter]

From a story in the Star:

Along the way, you may notice through one of the huge windows a rectangle of asphalt on the concrete apron where jets taxi. That's the "footprint," Armstrong says, of the old Terminal 1, a concrete bunker with low ceilings and bad lighting that always had the feel of escaping from Soviet-era eastern Europe. This ghostly image on the ground is a reminder of how tiny and cramped it was. Terminal 2, soon to be torn down, was almost as bad.

The old T1 worse than T2? A "bunker"? Boy, anti-modernist sentiment can really cloud the vision...

 

[adma]

True; but one must also account for years of abuse and neglect as a factor behind said cloudy vision--the GTAA and its predecessors only compounded T1's perhaps-remediable jet-age anachronisms by treating it like a piece of worthless obsolescent cr*p (Parkin? Whodat?).

For all T2's utilitarian long-long-terminal banality, it never sunk to the depths of T1-style abject neglect--it's as "meh" in 2007 as it was in 1972...

 

[allabootmatt]

You know, it's a sad commentary on the state of most (non-Pearson) airports in Nort America, especially the US, that T2 would be considered a perfectly acceptable, even above-average, facility at nearly any American hub. Hell, the Delta international terminal at JFK--gateway to the world for the country's biggest overseas carrier--makes T2 look like Chek Lap Kok.

 

[unimaginative2]

I think that the problem with Terminal 1 was always one of obsolescence rather than lack of architectural merit. Modern security measures made it crowded and confusing to navigate, and arriving on an international flight necessitated travel down many stairs into a narrow, dark underground corridor. It just wasn't built for modern aviation.

Terminal 2 was never really a particularly bad place by North American standards. It was always in good condition, and seemed to be quite frequently modernized. I agree that it was great compared to some particularly bad American terminals. I once waited while a plane refueled in Honolulu, and I was astonished to discover that it didn't seem to have been renovated since the sixties. The fact that it didn't have windows was kind of cool, but apparently it even has a bug infestation problem, according to some airline staff I spoke with.

 

[rbtaylor]

Hard to believe that all of the T2 and infield terminal passengers were in Pier F yesterday. Tons of spare capacity clearing US customs and security.

The number of people actively avoiding Pearson should drop dramatically in the next couple of years if they can keep it that way.

Now, if only they could do something about the runway lineups.