Here are two interesting items of old airport architecture from my trip to Michigan, one mysterious and the other sad.
At Willow Run, over near gate E39, was this fascinating structure.
Although everyone agrees that Willow Run built in 1942, this has a prewar look to it. Presumably one of the original buildings, it is in the southwest corner of the field far away from the old bomber plant and terminal, and nobody could tell me what it was built for. Anyway, it's a handsome deco airport building and it is good to see it still in use.
Not so pleasant was what I witnessed when returning my rental car at Detroit Metro on Tuesday after the show. The original 1928 passenger terminal in the old (northeast) corner of the airport has sat unused among the rental car parking lots for a long time. A couple of big yellow things had just started to tear it down, and looked like they would make short work of it. It might be gone by the time you read this.
(Screen shot from Google maps on my phone)
This structure must have been magnificent in its day. Also huge. I don't have official dimensions, but scaling from the 53-foot tractor trailers in the satellite image above, it was something like 570 by 160 feet. I've searched the web but haven't found a picture of it in its heyday, so I have to imagine what it looked like when Detroit was growing into America's fourth largest city. Maybe some of our old-photo hounds can track one down.
Sad to see this go, but obviously a difficult structure to repurpose nowadays. There is a much smaller "executive terminal" across the road, also an art-deco beauty, which is still in use and hopefully will be with us a while longer.
August
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