Pod Insights Search Engine Who buys luggage at the airport luggage store? About this episode If ever there was a place where every person inside was guaranteed to already have luggage, it would be inside an airport. And yet ... the airport luggage stores persist. Who is going to these places? To answer, we will of course, unpack the story of the entire airport -- how these hellish modern places of security and commerce came to be.
Alastair Gordon's Naked Airpor Alastair%20Gordont. https://bookshop.org/p/books/naked-airport-a-cultural-history-of-the-world-s-most-revolutionary-structure-alastair-gordon/6801435
Unclaimed Baggage https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/?tw_source=google&tw_adid=&tw_campaign=15900473005&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAACMDJJYdgMYEg3CNMXfvL8PjpDavy&gclid=Cj0KCQiAu8W6BhC-ARIsACEQoDAaAjJiz345s_6uooLtyZEa6Otm7yU0T3fr5z-J_XSMyy6N5aH0hlUaAoUaEALw_wcB.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 PJ Vogt? Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. It's the holidays here at Search Engine headquarters. In this season, like all seasons, the questions continue to roll in, providing our team, I would argue, the sharpest take on the national pulse of probably any news outlet anywhere. We know the world because we know the questions that people in the world have. And that's how we know that the most pressing concern, the thing Americans most wonder about currently, has to do with our nation's airports. We got not one, but three listener questions, all on the same topic.
0:35 Speaker 01 Hi, Search Engine. My name is Tiffany.
0:38 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm John Morris.
0:39 Speaker 03 And I'm Leah Siegel.
0:40 Speaker 01 And I have a question I'm hoping you can help me answer. What's the deal with airport shops?
0:45 Speaker 02 Who the fuck buys luggage in airports?
0:48 Speaker 03 Or are people buying luggage at the luggage store at the airport?
0:52 Speaker 01 I just cannot buy that anyone goes to the airport, probably waits and pays to check a suitcase, clears security, and then decides to buy another suitcase right before getting on their flight.
1:03 Speaker 03 Do they have a handful of clothing? Who needs a whole new bag in the airport after we've gotten through security?
1:09 Speaker 02 Perhaps it's like a babushka doll type thing, where you buy bigger luggage and then put your luggage inside. But I don't know.
1:18 PJ Vogt? Who buys luggage in an airport? To spell out the paradox here, every passenger, in theory, goes to the airport with the amount of luggage they need. The luggage store is only accessible to passengers. I've never seen a fellow passenger with loose clothes spilling out of their arms. And yet, the store is there. It does not make sense. Of course, nothing about an airport makes sense if you make the mistake of paying attention to it. The airport is where we are required to suspend our curiosity about its myriad weird rituals and just follow the rules. Bottled water is treated like a deadly weapon.
1:59 PJ Vogt? Our phones are put in a special airplane mode because otherwise, the plane will explode or something. We are told to respect the grand medical tradition of the emotional support golden doodle. To survive on a plane is to turn yourself for half a day into an incurious person.
2:17 PJ Vogt? Our show this fall was starting to feel, no offense, maybe a little smart. Taxes, inflation. It's okay to be smart sometimes, but it's also a relief to take a very silly question to a very smart person. So this week, we have found a bona fide cultural historian of airports, and we have the entire story. Not just who buys luggage at an airport, but why there's a luggage store, why there are stores at all, why there is security, why there's an airport, how we ended up with this strange building we take for granted, a place that contains both modern life's most commonplace miracle, flight available to anyone who can afford it, and its most migraine-inducing agonies.
3:02 PJ Vogt? Most great journeys begin at airports, but this one will never leave the airport. And we promise to answer the question haunting so many Americans. What kind of lunatic buys luggage at the airport luggage store? That's after these ads.
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6:06 PJ Vogt? Okay. First things first, do you mind just introducing yourself?
6:09 Speaker 04 My name's Aleister Gordon.
6:11 PJ Vogt? And we are talking to you because we have a highly specific question about airboards, which sort of, for us, as sometimes happens, spiraled into larger questions about airports. It started out with, I was just wondering why people sell luggage at airports. It then turned into like, why have we decided to have a sort of luxury mall prior to our experience of air travel? And it just made me want to understand, like, how did we end up with the airport as we have it? And so I was hoping you could tell me that story. Like, where does it even begin?
6:44 Speaker 04 I can write a whole book about it, actually.
6:49 PJ Vogt? Alastair Gordon. He's a writer, author of Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. One day, he was a normal person who thought about airports a normal amount. And then something happened that sent him on a 10-year odyssey, researching and writing this tome.
7:07 Speaker 04 I was writing for The New York Times for about 20 years, and then I was with The Wall Street Journal and traveling a lot, in airports a lot. And I think it was in Singapore. It was 4:00 in the morning, some connecting flight back to LA or something was canceled. And I just had one of those airport freakouts complete, you know, meltdown. I had to get to another plane, and I missed it, and it was 4:00 in the morning, and my bag went into some, you know, labyrinth of doom. And I kind of went nuts and tried to go down, you know, the belt that brings the baggage up from below.
7:42 PJ Vogt? Wait, you tried to go down the luggage conveyor belt?
7:44 Speaker 04 This is pre, yeah, this is pre-9/11, so they didn't shoot me right away. Nowadays, you'd be dead before you got near it. You know, I'd been drinking 40 gallons of coffee and writing on a deadline and everything. So at that moment, I thought, well, who the fuck made this? How did this happen?
8:01 PJ Vogt? Alastair, having some kind of breakdown on the baggage conveyor belt, saw one thing clearly: a question. How did the modern airport, with all its hellish contradictions, come to exist in the first place? Writers never know what question will ambush them next, what topic will seize a decade of their thinking. For Alastair, it would be the airport.
8:23 Speaker 04 I'd gone to the New York Public Library and to the Air and Space Archives in Washington, just looking for sort of cultural background in airports. There was a ton of technical stuff, you know. There virtually was nothing that was just taking the airport as a cultural phenomenon or an artifact, whatever you want to call it. So anyway, I started to just pull things together, did a bunch of articles, and then an editor I was working with said, you know, there's a famous book on railroad stations, but I've never seen anything on airports. So that's kind of how it started. Then, literally 10 years later, it took me that long to gather material. I interviewed hundreds of characters from around the world.
9:05 Speaker 04 So it was sort of an attempt to humanize a place that seemed so inhuman to me.
9:11 PJ Vogt? So today, we are following Alastair on his journey down the conveyor belt. We are going to understand the airport, really understand why it is that way. Chapter one, The Miracle of Flight. So what is the beginning? What's the beginning of the story?
9:26 Speaker 04 That took a long time to figure out. It was Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh, flying into Paris.
9:34 Speaker 05 The greatest stunt of all begins on the misty morning of May 20th as a young airmail pilot hastens to be the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. He hopes to capture a $25,000 prize for which the world's top aviators are competing. His name is Charles A. Lindbergh.
9:52 PJ Vogt? Charles Lindbergh. In 1927, he was still an unknown American airmail pilot. He was competing for a cash bounty offered by a wealthy hotelier to anyone who could safely fly from New York to Paris. Several other pilots had already died in the attempt.
10:08 Speaker 04 Lindbergh was literally a barnstormer, right? So he's this guy who's an incredibly youthful, athletic, handsome American, taking off from Long Island, where he barely got over the trees.
10:19 Speaker 05 The little monoplane with neither radio nor safety equipment is heavily loaded with fuel.
10:25 PJ Vogt? In the newsreel clip, you see his tiny little, single-engine plane. A crowd of men in suits pushes it from a hangar across a field to ready it for takeoff. The whole thing feels incredibly ill-advised.
10:36 Speaker 05 Ahead, 3,600 miles to Paris, and all America vicariously shares every lonely mile.
10:45 Speaker 04 And he comes in, and when he's trying to land, it's at night. And he couldn't believe that Bourget, Le Bourget, which was the first big urban airport in Paris, he couldn't believe that it was an airport because it looked too big. He thought it was a factory. He thought it was about to land at a factory or something. And it was this huge, incredibly well-designed airport.
11:05 PJ Vogt? There's a version of this story that's about Charles Lindbergh, how, after this flight, he became a hero, then later, a figure of national sympathy when his baby boy was kidnapped and murdered, and still later, a symbol of national scorn for his suspected Nazi sympathies during World War II. That's a version of the story, but we're here to talk about airports, not the people who flew between them.
11:31 PJ Vogt? When Lindbergh in 1927 reached Paris, he looked down and the airport he saw, which he was so stunned by, we wouldn't recognize it as the modern airport we all dutifully file through today. But it was a step towards it. It more resembled our airports than it did the bare bones hangar Lindbergh had left behind in New York.
11:51 Speaker 04 In terms of history of airport evolution, the Europeans were way ahead of Americans. In Europe, there was this sort of tradition of beautiful urbanistic railroad stations, and they kind of adapted that for their first airports. Most American airports were barns, you know, or hangars with nothing. Maybe there was a little room put aside in one of the hangars for passengers to sit and wait. But the Ford Airport in Dearborn, Michigan was the first that I could find comprehensively designed American airport. It had a terminal that was just for passengers. So you weren't in danger of being chopped in half by propellers and stuff.
12:26 PJ Vogt? Was that happening? Were people getting chopped in half?
12:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was dangerous. Also, you know, there were so many crashes. It was pretty horrible. You know, there's a good chance the plane was going to crash and you were dead. So people were very, very nervous about flying.
12:39 PJ Vogt? And what, sorry, just to, just, I'm just curious, like, in that very early era where the fatality rate is incredibly high, like, who is willingly flying? What are the circumstances in which someone says, like, "I really don't want to sit on a train. I know that I'm sort of playing Russian roulette." Is it just adventurers like Lindbergh?
12:56 Speaker 04 I mean, basically, the first commercial air travel in America was the mail service because you could make money from the government carrying air mail. And passengers were almost like a second thought. Most of them in the beginning were salesmen, you know, who could beat out the guy taking the train to Detroit by flying there, but at a risk, at a huge risk, right? I don't think many people, if they didn't have to fly, they didn't.
13:21 PJ Vogt? Flying was still considered so dangerous that after Lindbergh's arrival in Paris, the US government strongly suggested that its newly minted national celebrity not risk a flight back. Instead, the president sent a battleship to return him from France.
13:45 Speaker 06 Ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience, Mr. Graham McNamara is speaking from the Navy Yard, Washington DC. Awaiting Lindbergh. Lindbergh is coming down with a gang quest. A darn nice boy. Unassuming, quiet, very serious, and awfully nice.
14:07 PJ Vogt? Unassuming, quiet, very serious, and awfully nice. This is what America wanted from its influencers in the 1920s. With his newfound platform, Lindbergh decides to go on a tour of the US to spread the gospel of aviation for all.
14:20 Speaker 05 I want to express my appreciation of the reception I've had in America and the world.
14:27 PJ Vogt? At the Washington DC Press Club in 1927, he announces that Europe has much better airports than the ones we get here, and describes his dream for how America could catch up.
14:37 Speaker 05 There's a series of airports in every town and city in the process.
14:41 PJ Vogt? Lindbergh offers a diagnosis as to why America's air travel sucks.
14:45 Speaker 05 I think the biggest answer is the government subsidies.
14:49 PJ Vogt? In Europe, airports had been funded by very generous national subsidies from strong central governments. America didn't have a strong federal government yet, which meant here, you'd get the airport your town could afford.
15:01 Speaker 04 Congress was mainly Republican at that point. They didn't want anything to do with aviation. They thought it was dangerous, thought it was stupid.
15:08 PJ Vogt? Wait, so, sorry, the Republicans were not just saying like, oh, the federal government shouldn't fund things, but they were like, people shouldn't be flying because the planes are gonna crash?
15:16 Speaker 04 Yeah. They felt it was a crazy thing that would go away. It was like a fad. They really didn't believe it. Yeah.
15:23 PJ Vogt? It's so funny that like, flying would be like a new progressive idea.
15:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, I know, I know.
15:33 PJ Vogt? Chapter 2: How the Airport Becomes a Modern Wonder. Try to port yourself back to the early 1930s and just imagine how a lot of people would have viewed airports back then. Not as skeptically as like crypto or AI, and yet, a dangerous and expensive new technology, maybe not a good place to dump public money? The idea of popular commercial air travel did not yet exist. No one you knew was likely to have flunked. So if your mayor all of a sudden wanted to spend millions of dollars, millions of 1930s dollars, to take a bunch of centrally located municipal land and put runways there, it would not have been obvious why this was a great idea. My favorite article
16:17 PJ Vogt? about this from the New York Times in 1931 is called Aviation Seeks Solution of Airport Cost Problems. The piece lays out how, even in these smaller cities that had built commercial airfields, it was very unclear how to make the money back. In New Jersey, the Newark Airport had cost $4.2 million. The Times reported that it was making the city something like 75 grand a year. These projects looked uncomfortably like follies. Unless you could somehow convince the federal government to pony up, which no one could, the math was a little hard to justify. Alistair told me the story of one of the first politicians to really make this all work, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. He was mad that
17:01 PJ Vogt? New York City did not have its own proper airport. He wanted the president to pay for one, so he devised an elegant piece of political theater.
17:11 Speaker 04 He needed to rebuild the North Beach Airport, which is where LaGuardia is now. Most of that was from the federal government, but he pushed it through. I mean, he was very good at that. He was very bullheaded and just did it. There's a famous story of him. I think he bought a ticket on Penn Am to New York, and it said New York City. And of course, New York City's main airport then was Newark Airport. Newark Airport's very old, and it was in those kind of wetlands in New Jersey, so they had a lot of room to spread out. So he arrives in Newark, New Jersey, with a ticket that said New York City. And he said, "Look, I'm the mayor of New York City. This is not New York City."
17:55 Speaker 04 Everybody knew he was obviously a publicity stunt, so they flew him to Floyd Bennett Field, which was at the time, New York City's main airport. And it was a disaster. I mean, Newark was the main airport, but in terms of New York City in New York State, the main airport was Floyd Bennett Field. It's still there. You can go out and see the, you know, the hangars and everything. It's really cool. But not only was that way out of the way, but it was just, they couldn't expand it enough to be a modern airport. So yeah, so then he said, my ticket says New York City. So they flew him to Floyd Bennett Field, where someone picked him up and drove him to the mayor's mansion.
18:29 PJ Vogt? I kind of miss the days when like, New York City mayors were productively eccentric instead of unproductively eccentric.
18:37 Speaker 04 Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I think he might have been the last in some ways to have that kind of clout. And that's how LaGuardia Airport came about, which now seems like, I don't know if you fly in there.
18:47 PJ Vogt? I do. It's not a wonder of the world.
18:49 Speaker 04 No, no, no. But it was. And even the Nazi regime, who were obsessed with airports and aviation, they came and studied it because it was, at the time, it was the biggest airport in the world.
19:00 PJ Vogt? The Nazis in New York City, walking around LaGuardia Airport, marveling at everything American democracy was capable of. The airport inspired wonder in all sorts of people, not just Nazis.
19:13 Speaker 05 At New York's North Beach Airport, Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia signs contracts with three transcontinental airlines, which are to operate passenger service from the field. Crowds on hand for the ceremonies, get a preview of what is to be one of the world's finest air terminals.
19:27 PJ Vogt? One of the world's finest air terminals. Today, we only talk about which airport is the worst. This is before that changed, when a new airport was something exciting enough to bust out the parade horns and a mid-Atlantic broadcaster accent.
19:41 Speaker 05 $28 million will be spent on the airport, which is the largest single undertaking of the WPA. It's only 25 minutes by automobile from Midtown New York.
19:50 Speaker 04 And by May 1st, the city's great air terminal should be ready for traffic from Europe and the West Coast.
19:57 Speaker 04 LaGuardia Airport could handle so many, I can't remember exactly, but you know, 30 planes at a time. No one else could do that. And it was because of this, the central terminal was pretty conventional. I mean, it could have been a railroad station. But a bunch of unknown engineers, I was never able to find out who actually did it. They created this thing called the Skywalk boarding pier.
20:18 PJ Vogt? The Skywalk boarding pier. If you picture the very first airport design as a barn, the second design is more like a train station. The boarding pier is the beginning of the third design, where airports have spokes that stick out of them for people to board more planes more easily. LaGuardia is where this concept is invented. At LaGuardia, the Skywalk boarding pier jettled out in an arc, and it contained two separate levels, one for the passengers, another for an audience of spectators. It cost a dime to come watch the planes take off and land. In two years, the airport made a quarter million dollars off these dimes.
20:55 Speaker 04 Very few people go to the airport anymore to watch planes come in. I mean, there are nerds who are sky watchers, or whatever they call them. But most people go, you know, now just to meet people or travel themselves. But then it was a big deal. So they were trying to separate the gawkers from the actual passengers, and then passengers use the lower level. So it was the first, in a way, you know, really thought out, engineered, master plan for what an airport could be, how it could function more efficiently.
21:26 PJ Vogt? Somehow, the airport has transformed from a barn in a field to this 1930s architectural modern marvel. A place so miraculous, you had to build a spot for the spectators who would come to admire it. Later, FDR would usher in his New Deal. Airports across the nation would get federal funding, and a golden age would commence. And then later, still, the airport will become a nightmare, dark enough to cause a seemingly quite sane man to hurl himself down its conveyor belt. That story, plus, we will find out what kind of person buys luggage at an airport. We haven't forgotten the question. All of that, after these ads.
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24:36 PJ Vogt? Welcome back to the show and to Chapter Three, The Golden Age. Air travel is about to transform from something only the wealthy enjoy to an affordable luxury for middle-class Americans. A delightful adventure many more people will get to experience. Air travel will get safer and more affordable, but not yet crappy. A lot of this is about to happen because of World War II. War production had made planes more reliable. The war had given more American men experience flying and being flown. And now, after the war, there was general American prosperity.
25:14 Speaker 04 Post-war period, there was this huge, huge boom in air travel because all these GIs who'd flown to Europe, you know, they were used to be sitting in a air transport. That wasn't a big deal. So suddenly after the war, there was this massive boom in air travel. And at that point, they realized, you know, it was more than just a self-contained building. You needed these things. They called them skywalks, you know, these things extending out. Originally, they called them boarding docks or boarding piers. And again, as the skywalk at LaGuardia, it was a way to get multiple planes near the terminal all at the same time.
25:49 PJ Vogt? So I just want to make sure I'm picturing it correctly. It's like, we start with a barn. We move to a dedicated building that has space for people to watch, but it's sort of just like one terminal.
25:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's like a railroad station. Just think of it that way, you know?
26:02 PJ Vogt? So then we have the railroad station, then we get to, okay, we're going to need sort of multiple skywalks. Like, you're moving around the airport after World War II in a way that's a little bit more resembles the way we move around an airport now.
26:14 Speaker 04 Right.
26:15 PJ Vogt? So post-World War II, more people are comfortable with flying, like, but who is actually getting on these flights? And what are they flying for? Like, do you fly for vacation?
26:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, this had a lot to do with that 1950s expansion of tourism. More Americans could afford to fly to the Bahamas, you know, or fly to Jamaica, or fly to South America. This world of air travel, now at everybody's doorstep, has been created in 50 years or less. A world of flashing propellers.
26:45 Speaker 06 Shimmering jet streams, gleaming shapes.
26:49 Speaker 06 A world so exciting that it's sometimes hard to get it in focus.
26:54 PJ Vogt? This is a 1956 film from Shell, the oil and gas company. Essentially, an ad for air travel itself. Presumably, Shell had noticed that airplanes use a lot of fuel and that more people flying would be good for a fuel company. In the ad, you see all sorts of people boarding planes. People from different social classes, from different countries.
27:13 Speaker 06 Juan Perez of Caracas, Venezuela, with some routine things to see to in Maturine. Briefcase bulging and a lot to do en route. Minoru Yamata, aged 18, from Tokyo to California, USA. His first venture into the big world alone.
27:33 Speaker 06 And from Burlington, Vermont, Dorothy Gerstein and Irene Cooper, schoolteachers, with three weeks to see the Middle East and bring it home.
27:42 PJ Vogt? This democratic vision, the promise wasn't yet true. Coach fares had been recently introduced. Prices were coming down. But the reality was that the average flyer was a white businessman, flying on the company expense account. But things really were changing. 1955 is the first year where more Americans travel on planes than on trains. Two years later, planes supplant ocean liners as the most popular way to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Thirty years after Lindbergh's flight, his act of heroism is just how many people go on vacation. And Jim, what's the next big evolution in the airport? Like, you have the post-war boom, what happens next?
28:20 Speaker 04 Well, becoming the jet.
28:22 Speaker 06 Leave France after breakfast? Arrive in America before dawn? Not yet, perhaps. But the aircraft of the next few years will take a long step forward. Some are in production. Others in the air right now. From America, the Boeing 707.
28:42 Speaker 04 So a lot of promotional for new jet air travel was, you know, have breakfast in New York, you know, at the Plaza and have dinner at the Seville in London, you know, that same day. You know, you can get up In the morning, go to LaGuardia Airport and you can be in the Palm or Jamaica, wherever, instead of a ship slowly poking through the Caribbean or, you know, the Mediterranean or wherever, you have these instant kind of arrivals. It changed everything. It changed the way hotels were run. It changed the way inner-city transportation was maintained and it affected almost everything.
29:20 PJ Vogt? This is the truth about transportation. It doesn't just connect the world, it reshapes it. The car creates the suburb. The driverless car one day will reshape the city. Airports reshape America. And also, the jet actually reshapes the airport. The arrival of these enormous crowds at these airports, serving them, becomes the reason the airport begins to transform into a shopping mall with planes attached to it.
29:46 Speaker 04 I mean, there was a huge spread in Life Magazine about Friendship Airport, Baltimore, when it opened in the 50s. And they made a big deal about that there was a shoe shine shop. In fact, there was a shoe repair shop and there was beauty salons. There was a beauty salon and there was, you know, a bookstore and several restaurants and bar and everything.
30:08 PJ Vogt? When people go to the airport in that era, what is the experience they're having? Like, in the 1960s, say, if I like, walked into a dinner party, people were like, "How are you?" And I was like, "Oh, I had to fly today." Would that be confusing to people or would they understand it?
30:22 Speaker 04 I think it depends on the economic bracket you're talking about and, you know, what city you're talking about. I think for New Yorkers, they were very at home, flying. The whole term jet-setting came in in the 60s, right? I mean, that was about people who had money who would fly to Paris or London or New York or wherever and it wasn't a big deal. And they were jet-setters because it was just part of their life. But it still was romantic and sexy. And I remember, we always dressed up. I mean, you know, I would wear, at the age of 10, I'd have a blazer and a tie and nice shoes. You didn't go to the airport wearing a sweatshirt and sneakers. When I was 16, my older cousin, who was English, was staying with us in the summer.
31:03 Speaker 04 And my father took us to, first, the World's Fair, you know, 1964 World's Fair in New York in Flushing Meadow. And then he took us to Terminal at Kennedy, because my cousin was flying back to London. And that's when it seemed just like a miracle and all the stewardesses were beautiful. The pilots were handsome and the carpeting was fresh, bright red carpeting. And this incredible space age shape that had been created by Saranin, you know, to look like a bird in flight was just so sexy and so romantic.
31:35 Speaker 05 Newest things in air travel begin right here. TWA's Transworld Flight Center at New York International Airport. Telescoping ramps bring your flight gate to your jet. Everywhere the look, the soaring spirit of flight itself. So many new conveniences, luxurious lounges, shops and restaurants. Beautifully efficient too, with time-saving innovations like jet check-in. And unique carousel baggage handling.
32:13 PJ Vogt? This moment, the early 1960s, this is what Alastair calls the golden age. Flying is available to a lot of people. It's relatively affordable, but it still feels like a miraculous luxury. This beautiful moment, like many, very, very brief. Chapter four, a nightmare you soothe by shopping.
32:34 Speaker 04 Two and a half years later, when I was 18 and going to study in Paris myself, I traveled from TWA and it was already kind of falling apart and it wasn't so cool anymore.
32:45 PJ Vogt? And you could tell the difference in deterioration that fast?
32:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I remember the impression I was so excited to be flying from there. But as soon as I got there, you know, the carpet was sort of turning up at the edges. It just wasn't, you know, that might've all been in my mind, I know. But no, I think that's how rapidly it happens. By that point, airports were getting really badly crowded. Once this 747 came in, it really changed the whole formula. Airports couldn't keep up.
33:14 PJ Vogt? The 747, a much larger commercial plane, capable of carrying more people. But that also meant overcrowded airports. Airplane design, it turns out, can advance faster than airport design. An airport can only grow so big. There are other buildings around it. The problem would also later be exacerbated by the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. The government stopped regulating fares, as well as the number of airlines that could be in the market. Prices came down, more people got to fly. But at the same time, airports began to be stretched beyond a comfortable capacity. The final step in building the modern airport, this site of miracles that we dread having to visit, that step is about the increased need for security.
33:59 PJ Vogt? A need that actually starts earlier than the moment you're currently thinking of.
34:06 Speaker 06 A nine-hour ordeal of terror in El Paso as a Continental Airlines jet is hijacked by a father and his son. Government agents machine-gunned the plane's tires to prevent it taking off after it landed for fuel at El Paso after being seized over Phoenix. When the attention of the hijackers was diverted, the two hostess-
34:24 Speaker 04 The fascinating moment is 60s, early 70s. You have a really pretty intense series of hijackings, mainly Cuban exiles, who were hijacking planes to go back to Cuba. Also, that famous bombing in Jordan where terrorists blew up three airplanes on the runway at the same time, it was kind of extraordinary.
34:43 Speaker 06 Good evening. Arab guerrillas today blew up three hijacked airliners in the Jordanian desert north of Amman. Three jets worth $25 million.
34:52 PJ Vogt? Metal detectors appear at airports for the first time in 1970. Airports start x-raying carry-on luggage a couple of years after. Alistair says the 1970s really marked the beginning of airports as tense, high-security locations.
35:05 Speaker 06 President Nixon has announced several steps designed to counter hijacking. And the most dramatic was his announcement that armed government guards are going to be assigned to many US overseas and some domestic airline flights. More on that story from-
35:18 PJ Vogt? Of course, it's three decades after Nixon that the airport experience is completely transformed by 9/11. There's a version of this story that's about the tragedy of that day. How airplanes, a symbol of freedom, became something people had nightmares about. About what it felt like to fly in the years after, or to live in a country in the grip of terror and rage. But again, we're here to talk about airports. And 9/11 was the single biggest reason we end up with what we recognize as the modern airport. Today, we take permanent and aggressive steps to improve the security of our airways. The events of September the 11th were a call to action, and the Congress has now responded.
36:04 PJ Vogt? Just nine weeks after 9/11, on November 19, 2001, President Bush announces the creation of the TSA. Before that, airports had hired private companies to handle security. Now, the federal government stepped in. For the first time, airport security will become a direct federal responsibility,
36:24 PJ Vogt? overseen by a new undersecretary of transportation for security.
36:29 PJ Vogt? Additional funds will be provided for federal air marshals. And a new team of federal security managers, supervisors, law enforcement officers and screeners will ensure all passengers and carry-on bags are inspected thoroughly and effectively.
36:51 PJ Vogt? In the years immediately after, the TSA adds new regulations, often in response to foiled terror attempts. You take your shoes off because in December 2001, Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb. You have to dump out your water bottle because in 2006, plotters associated with Al Qaeda tried to blow up planes with explosives hidden in soda bottles. These violent attempts, thwarted, then memorialized in the small rituals of humiliation the TSA asked from us in exchange for flight. And today, once we pass through the TSA's border, we enter this vacuum-sealed place, the modern concourse, where we're invited to shake it all off at the duty-free.
37:35 Speaker 04 So to your first question about, you know, why do you buy a suitcase in an airport? Suddenly you had this incredible group of people who had ready cash, or at least sparkling credit cards, and you've got them trapped for three hours. You know, I mean, like the ideal capital situation, right? It began with just simple shops from kind of newsstands and snack bars. And now it's huge luxury items, you know, that, you know.
38:00 PJ Vogt? Wait, but so is part of the answer to why do you buy a suitcase at the airport? Not the entire answer, but part of the answer is 9/11?
38:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
38:09 PJ Vogt? Really?
38:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:10 PJ Vogt? Because the more security you have, the longer people have to wait in the airport and the more they're stuck in between the gate and their flight?
38:16 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, do you ever go through security and then go back out through security to have a smoke or something? No. Once you're through that nightmare, do you really want to go through it again? So, you know, whereas before 9/11, it probably, it wasn't that big a deal. So, yeah, you really have them stuck there. And of course, that concourse, what the engineers called the sterile concourse. You know, you've been stripped of any possible dangerous weapon, but you also can't leave. So you're the ideal target for marketing.
38:45 PJ Vogt? Interesting. You're a captive audience. You're a completely captive audience.
38:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. It's no great secret, you know? And that new airport that opened in Dubai, or the new terminal, it's only got like, you know, the highest level of luxury goods for sale in this place. And people apparently now go there who want to get Le Boutin shoes and they don't want to go all the way to Paris. They go to the airport to buy their shoes.
39:11 PJ Vogt? It's funny because it's a return. It's like, imagining anybody going to the airport not to fly is really strange, my powers of imagination. But it's like to buy expensive shoes or, you know, about a century ago, to watch the planes take off are the two reasons.
39:25 Speaker 04 I think the people who go to the shop, they don't just go in and buy a shoe and then leave. I think they're going somewhere. But, you know, they don't wait to go to Paris. They get it there because it's just accessible. I mean, I do it too. We're all kind of sluts for, you know, commercial. Shopping is a kind of an addictive habit and it's, I always look, you know, occasionally buy a piece of clothing at a good airport. But there's a moment of, I think there's this sort of intoxication, you know, when you go into a place and it gets your mind out of the realities of what's happening around you.
40:01 PJ Vogt? Yeah, it's funny, airports feel to me always tense. Like, I always have this feeling of like, if I say the wrong thing, if I do the wrong thing, if I make the wrong joke, my life could very rapidly change. You feel like you're in a police station.
40:13 Speaker 04 Oh, totally, yeah. And it could change so quickly. I mean, if I'd done that thing I did in Singapore, whenever it was, you know, pre-9/11, if you did that now, you would be a terrorist. I mean, I've seen even people at those security checkpoints, you know, just someone who's haggard and tired and angry and hasn't had a meal, you know, whatever, and they say something rude to the security guys. And they're practically arrested on the spot. The other reaction that I find fascinating, and I've been tracking this a little bit, is airport designers' attempt to address that high level of angst, right? You know, San Francisco built, in one of their terminals, they have a yoga and a meditation center, which I've used.
40:55 PJ Vogt? Really?
40:56 Speaker 04 Actually, it's wonderful. Yeah, you just go in and do a lotus position, you know, an hour before your flight. It's very nice. You go through the horrors of security and then you go... They also have a beautiful bamboo grove. I mean, that's... That, to me, is almost more important than any of the economic stuff. The idea of addressing just the horrors of the anxiety of travel. Getting them out of that headset of like, you're just cattle being prodded through a horrible cattle gate.
41:26 PJ Vogt? You might remember that in the very first chapter of Search Engine, this book we write for you each week, we met a person who had an unusual solution to the cattle-like feeling airports can provoke. His ritual was to focus his anxiety on airline water quality. He brought two separate Yeti water bottles to ensure that he could at least drink the liquids he wanted while he was being manhandled by the TSA and then crammed into a tube in the sky. Each week, we try to find an answer to a question. Often, we get an answer. Sometimes, we get led somewhere else. Alistair had really helped me understand how we got the modern airport and its many contradictions. But I did still want to know who was walking into these places and buying luggage.
42:09 PJ Vogt? Epilogue.
42:16 PJ Vogt? With this luggage thing, like, do you have a sense of like, who actually is buying luggage in airports?
42:21 Speaker 04 You want me to be an expert in who's buying baggage at a fucking airport? Who do you think I am? Jesus Christ. Oh, let me just call up my friend in the luggage department. I have no idea. I think, I do know one thing. Occasionally, I go to this, you know, this Woodbury Commons? It's upstate. It's this incredible discount mall, but it's super luxury goods. I mean, you go there and the line outside Gucci shop is like about a mile long because you have these Japanese, Germans, Italians. I see all of them are there, families from China. And they get there, and this is true, this is not an airport, but they buy huge wheelies. You know, not the wheelie that you and I use when we go on a weekend job interview or something.
43:04 Speaker 04 These giant things, and they fill them with all this luxury goods because it's half the price of what they'd pay in Tokyo or Paris or whatever.
43:11 PJ Vogt? Oh, so your theory is like, perhaps what's happening at like the Toomey store at LaGuardia is that people are buying expensive luxury goods that are cheaper here to take home? And that's why you would do it? You would do it maybe even on a connection?
43:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm not saying that's the only reason. No, I mean, I think some of it must be that, but some of it's also when you're traveling, you know, it's not a bad time to push the sale of a suitcase, you know, to someone who's traveling. I mean, I've bought a few suitcases at airports.
43:43 PJ Vogt? You have?
43:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, I bought you, bought a new one at Istanbul Airport because it was really nice. Istanbul has an amazing airport. I bought myself a new suitcase there because it was the best thing I'd ever seen. My wife or someone had taken the bag I usually took on long trips and I needed a new one. And I was sitting there for three hours and they went, oh, I'll just buy this now. It seems kind of overpriced, but it's really nice. I don't know, you know, just, this again anecdotal, I have no idea. Don't quote me on any of this.
44:11 PJ Vogt? I'm quoting you on all of this. What did you have? What do you, because you already have a suitcase on you. Do you transfer the stuff out of your old suitcase into the new suitcase?
44:19 Speaker 04 You were really obsessed with this. Yeah. Yes, you know, to get into my personal life, I remember taking the suitcase, the brand new one, which is way too expensive. I would never normally buy a suitcase that expensive. Transferring all my stuff from the old suitcase into the new suitcase, zipping it back up, going to the bathroom, coming back and having a new suitcase that I had to then go and check in and throwing out the old one.
44:48 PJ Vogt? Where did you throw it out?
44:49 Speaker 04 Oh, my God.
44:55 PJ Vogt? Listener, I want you to know, this year, nearly every time I've flown, I've stopped by the luggage store at the airport, lingered, hoping to spy one single person walking in to make one of these confusing purchases. I'd mostly despaired. I never would have suspected that the airport luggage buyer would in fact be the airport historian. I thought I would never find the person I was looking for and he was in front of me the whole time.
45:18 Speaker 04 I went over to a garbage receptacle that was large enough to, you know, was not a hard case suitcase, my old. It was sort of a, you know, crappy duffel bag type thing. I just.
45:30 PJ Vogt? Because part of my fear, I got to tell you, is that you can't leave an unattended old suitcase at an airport. You know what's going to happen.
45:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, I know. Yeah, but you can crumple it up into ball and put it into garbage can. I mean, now I feel like I'm being cross-examined by the district attorney or something. I swear, Your Honor, I swear.
45:51 PJ Vogt? Alastair Gordon, a very good sport. His book about airports is called Naked Airport, A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. After the break, one of the listeners who brought us a question about luggage stores has their own recommendation, a recommendation which blew my mind. It could be the solution for all of your holiday gifting needs. That's after some ads.
46:27 PJ Vogt? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI. If you're tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming algorithms designed for passive background noise, you need to check out MUBI. MUBI is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world, curating and elevating visionary filmmaking that's handpicked always. It's the kind of platform for movies you'll actually watch, fall in love with, and keep thinking and talking about long after the credits roll. One of their newest exclusive titles is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, directed by visionary writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, who you might know from I Saw the TV Glow. It's a world-expanding, genre-bending wonder starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.
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48:39 PJ Vogt? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Mint Mobile. Remember back when you were a kid and you'd spot something cool at the store, only for your mom to remind you to just wait until the holidays? Well, Mint Mobile is giving you the present early with zero waiting required. Right this minute, all of their wireless plans are available for just $15 a month. If you make the switch to Mint, your monthly expenses will take a huge dip without your signal quality taking a hit. You get high-speed data, unlimited talk, and unlimited text powered by the nation's largest 5G network. There's no need to buy a new device either. You bring your own phone and keep your current number. So what are you waiting for? To get your new wireless plan for $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com search. That's mintmobile.com search. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com search.
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49:55 PJ Vogt? Before we leave you this week, our listener, John, had a very interesting recommendation, an airport luggage-themed recommendation, which he shared and which I have found myself repeating over and over. So I wanted to share it with you. It's a store you might want to check out when you next find yourself in Alabama.
50:12 Speaker 02 So I grew up in the South and I was going to my uncle's lake, Gunnersville Lake in Alabama, and it's right next to Scottsboro, Alabama. And since a kid, I've been going to this place called Unclaimed Baggage, which is where all of the unclaimed baggage ends up that is lost, as in travel. So, and when I was a kid, it was literally like... Folding tables and suitcases opened up that you would bid on different items. You'd be like, oh, man, oh, this new pair of Nikes here. Could I, how much are these? I'll give you five bucks for them. And the guy's like, ah, fifteen. And it was like literally haggling over open suitcases.
50:52 Speaker 02 And now this place is like a Walmart with like massive different sections from jewelry to like sporting equipment. You can buy surfboards there to like, you know, all kinds of random stuff that you're like, how were you traveling with that? Like, how did this get lost?
51:09 PJ Vogt? And it's now on the internet.
51:11 Speaker 02 Yes, they have like an online shopping experience, Unclaimed Baggage, and then it's still in a hub in Scottsboro, Alabama. It's like the biggest thing in Scottsboro, Alabama. It's a tiny town.
51:22 PJ Vogt? And everything, everything is something that was unclaimed baggage? Like, they don't also just sell extra stuff? It's...
51:28 Speaker 02 That's a great question. I am, you know, I don't know. Could be false advertising at this point because it looks very luxurious, like some of the items there. But then again, you know?
51:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're selling new stuff, right?
51:39 Speaker 02 People lose everything.
51:41 PJ Vogt? I should just say, Unclaimed Baggage, there is a way to visit the store without traveling to Alabama. Unclaimed Baggage has an online store, unclaimedbaggage.com. I see on it today Dolce and Gabbana slippers that retail for $745, half off, or this pair of green gray rollerblades, $25.99. There's a lone Super Smash Brothers cartridge for Nintendo Ultimate, or you can just buy a mystery box. Honestly, buy your family unclaimed luggage mystery boxes this holiday season. What a miraculous store.
52:15 Speaker 02 It's like everything imaginable that you could imagine that somebody lost in their luggage and they were just like precious items. And then some stuff that's just like thrift store trash. But I love thrift stores. I go thrift starting all the time and this is always a highlight when we go down there because it's like, there's a story behind each item.
52:34 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
52:34 Speaker 02 And you're thinking about like, oh, man.
52:35 Speaker 03 That you're making up completely.
52:36 Speaker 02 I'm like, I got these like leather, like Italian handmade leather shoes that are like woven leather that I would, they probably, I don't know how expensive they are.
52:44 Speaker 03 Those definitely came out of someone's suitcase.
52:46 Speaker 02 They're like super expensive. I could never afford them. They definitely came out of somebody's suitcase and I'm like, man, these are awesome. Like, I would never own these unless I came to Unclaimed Baggage.
52:56 Speaker 02 They're not dirty. They're off-white.
53:02 PJ Vogt? Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pennemaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perlo, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Moira Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schaff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine
53:43 PJ Vogt? with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
54:12 PJ Vogt? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing search engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, VistaPrint has you covered with the expert
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