Goodbye to Gate 35X, cursed portal to the rest of America

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Goodbye to Gate 35X, cursed portal to the rest of America

By Dan Zak
April 7, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Let’s get right to it: It was a bus station. A bus station in an airport. It was two places you’d 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 wasn’t a vortex like the Springfield Interchange, or a labyrinth like the Metro station at L’Enfant Plaza. Gate 35X didn’t qualify as a municipal quirk, like Washington’s 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. Dante’s 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 https://twitter.com/MrDanZak

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. As a former airline analyst, I had to research Gate 35X. Glad I never had to use it! ...

As a former airline analyst, I had to research Gate 35X. Glad I never had to use it! Never knew that in the USA, passengers were being bussed to their planes. The USA's infrastructure deficit strikes again!

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