Style
Goodbye to Gate 35X, cursed portal to the rest of America
By
Dan Zak
April 7, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Lets get right to it: It was a bus station. A bus station in an airport. It was two places youd rather not be, melded into one place.
There was no flourish to its badness. Gate 35X at Reagan National Airport did not have the utilitarian exotica of the Dulles people-movers, trundling across a tarmac Tatooine. It did not have the high-low smack of Union Station, where travelers are welcomed by the Roman arches of Constantine but digested through a boarding area that feels like the waiting room of an ER. Gate 35X wasnt a vortex like the Springfield Interchange, or a labyrinth like the Metro station at LEnfant Plaza. Gate 35X didnt qualify as a municipal quirk, like Washingtons lack of a J Street. Gate 35X was just a bus station. In an airport.
Except, somehow, it was more than that. It was a funnel, a choke point, a cattle call. One gate, as many as 6,000 travelers per day. The ceilings were lower. The seats were all taken, as were the electrical outlets. There was no bathroom down there, no vending machine, no water fountain. Dantes circles were over-invoked. The complaining was olympic. Queues kinked in our slow sprint to somewhere else, through a bay of four doors, via shuttle rides that were short distances but long journeys, onto small regional jets bound for second-tier American cities.
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Hardly anyone is traveling through Gate 35X anymore because of the pandemic, but soon no one will travel through it ever again. On April 20, DCA is retiring 35X with
the soft opening of a new regional terminal, a normal terminal, with 14 gates and 14 jet bridges instead of one gate and zero jet bridges.
Luxury! Space! End of an era! End of an error!
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Dan Zak
Dan Zak is a reporter for The Washington Post. He writes a wide range of news stories, narratives and profiles from local, national and foreign assignments, from the Academy Awards to Fallujah, Iraq. He joined The Post in 2005. Follow
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