New York City has scads of very large buildings, but not many are as big as the glass-and-steel structure nearing completion on the south side of Kennedy International Airport.
The airport’s huge new Terminal One will encompass 2.6 million square feet of passenger check-in zones, security checkpoints, baggage-claim areas, restaurants, duty-free shops and boarding gates.
That will make it nearly as big as the Empire State Building and bigger than JPMorgan Chase’s new headquarters on Park Avenue and more than triple the size of the new train hub beneath Grand Central Terminal.
It’s so massive that it is supplanting three of the eight terminals that once made up Kennedy: the existing Terminal 1 and the demolished Terminals 2 and 3.
The only airport terminal in the United States that will rival its size is the lone terminal at Denver International.
But Terminal One’s builders know that its sheer magnitude is not what the tens of thousands of international travelers expected to pass through it daily will measure it by, after the first phase opens later this year. The goal underlying its design and planning was to make it one of the five best airport terminals in the world, said Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Kennedy.
Such an objective was extremely ambitious for an agency that, until recently, had been running some of the most reviled major airports in the world. Last year, Kennedy ranked 89th in the world in an annual customer-satisfaction survey conducted by Skytrax.
After Mr. Cotton arrived at the Port Authority in mid-2017, he recalled, “the most frequent question I got asked was, ‘Why are the New York and New Jersey airports so bad?’”
By then, Joseph J. Sitt, a global real estate developer, had bankrolled a campaign known as Global Gateway Alliance to press for comprehensive improvements of New York’s airports. “We’re frustrated that it took so long but we’re excited that it’s getting close,” he said of the overhaul of Kennedy.
Mr. Sitt said he remained skeptical that Terminal One would open for business in 2026 and he questioned why the redevelopment of Kennedy had to cost $19 billion. He said he estimated the work could have been done for 15 to 20 percent less.
“Sounds like there’s a lot of fat and a lot of hands out along the way,” he said.
Throughout Mr. Cotton’s tenure, overhauling the Port Authority’s airports has been one of the agency’s primary goals. An $8 billion rebuild transformed LaGuardia from the butt of jokes to a global award winner.
The new Terminal A at Newark Liberty International, which cost about $2.7 billion, earned five stars in the annual Skytrax ratings.
Those projects were preludes to the magnum opus playing out now at Kennedy. Construction of the $8.5 billion Terminal One is just one piece of a plan to remake the 78-year-old airport without interrupting its steadily rising tide of travelers.
The Port Authority is spending about $4 billion to untangle Kennedy’s spaghetti bowl of roadways and upgrade its infrastructure, including its parking and utilities. Across the sprawling campus from the new Terminal One, another gigantic building — Terminal 6 — is nearing completion.
The $4.2 billion T6 will replace the old Terminals 6 and 7. Like Terminal One, it is being built by a consortium of private companies, and it too will open in phases beginning this year.
JFK Millennium Partners, the developer of T6, set a goal of taking the stress out of the airport experience, said Derek Thielmann, project director of Vantage Group, one of the partners.
To ease travelers’ anxieties about how far away their gates are, he said, gates and planes will be visible from all over the terminal, even the security-screening area. Sunlight will stream in from large oculi in the ceiling, including one above an art-filled seating area that Mr. Thielmann said was modeled on Union Square in Manhattan.
He said the technology in T6 would be state of the art, and include bag-drop machines equipped with biometrics as well as kiosks and overhead video screens — which can be dedicated to certain airlines based on their needs — instead of dedicated ticket counters.
Still, T6 will be less than half the size of the new Terminal One, which is so big that the AirTrain runs through the middle of it. “They essentially built a giant box around it,” said Jessica Forse, who is overseeing Kennedy’s redevelopment for the Port Authority.
In Terminal One’s soaring entryway, which is already constructed, white columns shaped to resemble trees stretch 90 feet to hold up the bowtie-shaped roof.
Large hanging works of art will eventually flank the main entrance, said Marisa Von Wieding, vice president for operations at the new terminal.
Between the terminal and the parking garage, there will be a 3.5-acre courtyard with a garden studded by boulders that were trucked in from quarries up the Hudson River.
More than 2,000 workers are currently on site, laying floors and installing conveyor belts, escalators and nine baggage carousels. In the luggage-sorting area, dozens of robotic carts that will carry suitcases to inspectors in a separate room are being tested.
On the departures level, there will be four islands for ticketing passengers and dropping off bags. Travelers will then move into a screening area as large as a football field. Terminal One’s security operation will be the first in the nation in which some screeners will inspect passengers’ belongings remotely from an adjacent room, Ms. Von Wieding said.
While standing in line for screening or retrieving their luggage on the lower level, travelers may notice heat rising from the floor. Ms. Von Wieding said the building’s radiant heating and cooling system, necessitated by the terminal’s vast open spaces, was among the largest installed anywhere in the country.
“If you ever want to arrive barefoot, this is the terminal for you,” she said with a smile.
Mr. Cotton, the Port Authority executive director, recalled the precarious process of arranging the financing for Terminal One, which fell apart before Covid brought all air traffic to a sudden halt and had to be restructured after the pandemic. But now, with his retirement approaching, Mr. Cotton, 81, said he was confident that the first phases of the two big terminals would be completed this year.
“The momentum is way beyond question,” Mr. Cotton said. “The Port Authority has proved its capability to manage projects of this scale and to do them at world-class quality.”
Patrick McGeehan is a Times reporter who covers the economy of New York City and its airports and other transportation hubs.
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