By Jared Ebersole in Video — 10 Apr 2026

The Manhattan Airport Terminal Hidden Under a Luxury Condo Tower

Before The Corinthian became one of New York's largest apartment towers, its block was an airline terminal where passengers checked in for flights before boarding buses to the airports.

The Corinthian does not look like it belongs to airport history.

It looks like a postmodern luxury tower that decided every apartment deserved a bay window. The building rises in a bundle of rounded columns near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, more resort than runway, with a lobby, plaza, health club, pool, and hundreds of apartments stacked above Murray Hill.

But the base has a stranger past.

Before this was one of New York's most distinctive condo towers, the block was the East Side Airlines Terminal.

Where it is

The Corinthian, 330 East 38th Street, New York, NY 10016.

For a while, air travel in New York did not really begin at the airport. It began in Manhattan.

That sounds impossible now, when a trip to JFK or LaGuardia can feel like a second commute bolted onto the front of your flight. But in the mid-20th century, airlines and public agencies experimented with a different model: bring the airport terminal into the city. Passengers could buy tickets, check in, handle baggage, and board airport buses from a dedicated Manhattan facility.

The first major version was the glamorous 42nd Street Airlines Terminal near Grand Central. But as air travel grew and Queens airports became more important, the east side needed a terminal that could move buses more efficiently than a Midtown street grid full of taxis, trucks, and commuters.

The answer was a full-block facility next to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

The East Side Airlines Terminal opened in 1953 on the west side of First Avenue between East 37th and East 38th Streets. Its location was the whole point. Buses could load passengers inside the terminal, descend toward the tunnel approach, and head directly to Queens for LaGuardia and Idlewild, later renamed JFK. The terminal consolidated airport bus service and made the city end of the airport trip feel more orderly.

The building was not just a bus stop.

Passengers entered into a large ticketing hall with domestic airline counters, bus gates, airline offices, and services layered through the building. A rooftop parking area served motorists. Buses moved through ramps and loading platforms. The airport was still miles away, but the ritual of departure had already begun.

That is what makes the idea so elegant.

The city was admitting that the hardest part of air travel was not always the flight. It was the distance between Manhattan and the runway. By turning a block near the tunnel into a remote terminal, New York tried to make the airport feel closer than it really was.

For a few decades, the system made sense.

Then the logic changed. Airports built better ticketing and baggage systems of their own. Air travel became more common. More passengers began their trips from the suburbs instead of Manhattan. Taxis, private cars, rental cars, and later airport rail connections changed the ground-transportation market. The idea that everyone would funnel through one Manhattan terminal aged badly.

By the early 1970s, the East Side terminal was already struggling. Airline check-in service ended in 1973. Bus operations continued for a time, but passenger volume fell and the building became more of a rental property than a true air terminal. Carey moved its airport buses to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in 1984. The next year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority auctioned the East Side site for $90.6 million.

Developers originally expected to demolish the terminal.

Then they discovered the old building was too useful to waste.

Much of the former terminal was retained and folded into the base of the new project. The residential tower was built above and beside it, with new columns added to support the structure. The eastern portion along First Avenue was removed for a landscaped plaza, but the old terminal did not vanish completely. It became the podium, office space, garage, and amenity infrastructure beneath The Corinthian.

The best detail is the fourth floor.

What had once been the terminal's roof became the building's amenity level, with a health club, terrace, jogging track, and swimming pool. In other words, a roof tied to airport-era movement was reimagined as leisure space for a residential tower.

That is a very New York kind of reuse.

The Corinthian opened in 1988 with 863 apartments and was described as the city's largest apartment building at the time. Its curved windows gave every apartment wide views. Its full-block footprint turned an obsolete transportation facility into a private residential world. The airport terminal disappeared from public memory because the new building was so visually loud.

But the site still tells the story if you know the sequence.

First, New York tried to solve airport access by moving the passenger experience into Manhattan. Then air travel outgrew that centralized model. Then real estate absorbed the terminal and turned its bones into a luxury base.

Today, the trip to the airport starts wherever your phone says the car is arriving.

For a generation of New Yorkers, it started on this block.