Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at the outlook for air travel this weekend, especially at Newark Liberty International Airport. And we’ll see how a Times Square office building is turning into housing.
The busiest runway for departures at Newark Liberty International Airport is closed. There are lingering concerns about communications disruptions between air traffic controllers and airplanes. There are staffing shortages at control centers, including the one guiding planes to Newark.
Sheldon Jacobson, a travel security and safety expert, had already called the problems at Newark “a perfect storm” — and that was 11 days ago, before a real storm rolled in ahead of the Memorial Day weekend. And the Memorial Day weekend is traditionally the beginning of the summer travel season.
His prediction for the next few days at an airport whose troubles are in the spotlight? “Weather accounts for three-quarters of delays,” he told me on Friday.
The prediction from the National Weather Service was for a messy start to the Memorial Day weekend: Mostly cloudy skies at Newark today, with a 30 percent chance of rain, mainly this afternoon, and the possibility of isolated showers on Saturday. Sunday and Monday will be warmer, with some sun on Saturday and more on Sunday and Monday, said James Tomasini, a meteorologist with the agency.
More delays, more canceled flights?
By 6 p.m. Thursday, more than 410 flights were late, and 16 had been canceled. Just over 40 percent of the delayed flights and eight of the eight cancellations were United Airlines flights. That is hardly surprising: United accounts for 70 percent of the flights at Newark. But Jacobson said that he was “cautiously optimistic” about getting through the weekend without worse headaches because the Federal Aviation Administration is now limiting how many planes can take off and land at Newark.
Since Tuesday, only 28 arrivals and 28 departures an hour have been allowed. That is far less traffic than Newark once handled.
One reason for the reduction is that the longest runway at Newark is closed for resurfacing and will remain out of service until late October. Next month, when much of the work on that runway is finished, six more planes will be allowed to come and go every hour.
Meanwhile, at J.F.K. and LaGuardia
Rebecca Alesia, an adviser with SmartFlyer in New York City, said that some customers with tickets from Newark had asked to change to flights leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport or LaGuardia Airport. “There’s extra demand and strain on those airports,” she said. And if customers are tied to a particular airline — United, she said — “it’s almost impossible to change to another carrier without a seat penalty.” United announced a “flexibility waiver” that allowed Newark passengers to reschedule flights without having to pay change fees or fare differences. That waiver ends today.
Kennedy has its own issues, mostly involving getting into the airport, because a $19 billion overhaul is underway. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs J.F.K. as well as Newark and LaGuardia, is promising two new terminals to make J.F.K. “the airport that the region deserves” — and streamlined roadways leading to them.
But for now, it says the roads around J.F.K. are so clogged that you should take mass transit if you can. If you must drive, the Port Authority says that you should book parking spaces at airport lots in advance. It cautioned that travelers who do not “pre-book” will be charged a drive-up surcharge and may not find an open parking spot.
The Port Authority advises arriving at the airport at least two hours before departure time for domestic flights and three hours for international flights. That is the conventional wisdom. But there are those who follow the social media “airport theory,” which involves arriving at the airport 15 minutes before flights begin boarding.
Michael DiCostanzo, a content creator who believes that he helped start the 15-minute trend with videos about how he breezed through security, said that his point had been misunderstood. He said he just wanted to show that getting to the gate often takes less time than people think it does.
He missed the 15-minute mark at J.F.K. The walk from baggage check-in and screening took 18 minutes 57 seconds. He said J.F.K. was “the worst airport to do this in” because the gates are far from the ticket counters and security checkpoints. “Any other airport would have been five minutes,” he said.
Weather
Expect a cloudy day with a chance of showers in the afternoon and the early evening, and a high temperature of 64. At night, it will drop to the low 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Memorial Day (Monday).
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The apartment hunters of YouTube: Creators are documenting their housing searches online. They give their viewers advice and tap into a global fascination with what it’s like to live in New York City.
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What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” Devlin Barrett, a Times reporter who covers the Justice Department, puts the federal investigation of former Andrew Cuomo in context. Also, Peter S. Goodman, a global economics correspondent for The Times, discusses his latest book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything.” The program is broadcast on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
For a Times Square office tower, an apartment conversion
The 38-story office building has been nearly 80 percent vacant for three years, ever since the main tenant moved out.
It won’t be an office building forever. Officials plan to turn it into an apartment house that will still have some office space, along with roughly 37,000 feet for retailers.
The plan is to designate a quarter of the 1,250 units as “affordable,” which, according to the most recent figures, would rent for roughly $2,174 a month. The typical asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Midtown Manhattan was at least $4,500 in April, according to data from the real estate company StreetEasy.
The change was approved by New York State’s Economic Development Corporation in a vote that was another sign of how Midtown is changing in the aftermath of the pandemic, which upended traditional work patterns. State and city officials see the decision to repurpose 5 Times Square as part of a push to “finding anywhere and everywhere we can to build housing.” The state estimates that some 10,000 new apartments have been built or are under construction in former office buildings.
Still, my colleague Mihir Zaveri writes that office conversions remain a relatively small part of the city’s response to the housing crisis. Many housing experts think the city needs hundreds of thousands of additional homes to break the housing shortage and make things more affordable. Tax breaks help.
Office conversions can be problematic — they can be costly and complicated, and developers might resist repurposing buildings if the demand for office space “stabilizes and comes back a little bit,” said Moses Gates, vice president for housing and neighborhood planning at the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit civic organization, which supported the conversion.
“We’re still in a little bit of uncharted territory here,” he said.
METROPOLITAN diary
Friendly Driver
Dear Diary:
I was getting on an M5 bus going downtown from Columbia. I was on a call with my husband and hauling a suitcase, which made it difficult to use my phone to pay the fare.
“I love you,” my husband said as I fumbled with the phone.
“I love you too,” the bus driver said.
— Simone Pinet
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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