LaGuardia Airport's historic and once-bustling Terminal A goes silent after Spirit Airlines' demise

In its heyday in the 1940s, LaGuardia Airport's Marine Air Terminal bustled with passengers bound for destinations around the world aboard Pan American’s "flying boats," which took off from a dock jutting out into the East River.

Later additions to the building, now known as Terminal A, accommodated land-based flights. In recent decades it housed regional and budget airlines like Delta Shuttle, JetBlue, Frontier and Spirit.

But on Sunday afternoon, it was eerily quiet after its sole remaining tenant permanently shut down over the weekend.

"We regret to inform you that Spirit Airlines has ceased global operations," read a flyer posted outside the art deco rotunda, which sits across Runway 4 from the modern, steel and glass behemoths that are Terminals B and C.

Terminal A has seen vicissitudes before; as air traffic shifted to other terminals and airports, it housed only civil aviation operations for several decades ending in the 1980s.

The next chapter in its life is uncertain after Spirit announced it was going out of business and laying off 17,000 employees. It had used Terminal A since 2021.

Spirit’s closure comes amid rising fuel prices tied to the war with Iran, which dealt a final blow to the long financially troubled airline. President Donald Trump recently floated a deal for the federal government to purchase a controlling stake in the airline, but it fell through with the company’s bondholders.

In its 2026-2035 capital plan issued last year, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns LaGuardia, announced it will replace the 1980s-era gate and boarding areas of Terminal A while preserving the portion that is the original Marine Air Terminal, "to meet demand and continued passenger growth."

Halimah Elmariah, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority, said Spirit's departure was unlikely to result in changes to the plan.

"We plan to move forward with preserving the landmarked Marine Air Terminal while dramatically upgrading" the attached concourse, Elmariah said.

On Sunday, a few airport staff and security guards lingered by the departures area, where an idle SmarteCarte vending machine offered trolleys for $6.

Aslam Sarker, a taxi stand attendant, said a few yellow cabs showed up early in the morning, but he told them to go to the other terminals since there would be no passengers Sunday.

Sarker wasn’t sure if his company would transfer him to a different taxi lot elsewhere.

"After Monday, maybe we know something," said Sarker, a New Yorker originally from Bangladesh.

Linda Freire, a former Pan American manager at Terminal A who now chairs the Pan American Museum inside the Cradle of Aviation in Uniondale, said she hopes the public will continue to be able to enjoy the spectacular architecture of the space.

Built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, the departures area in the rotunda features a circular mural called ''Flight,'' by the artist James Brooks, which was painted over in the 1950s and restored in the 1970s. It shows the evolution of humanity’s involvement in flight.

The building’s exterior is adorned with a terra-cotta frieze depicting flying fish, a nod to the Boeing 314 flying boats that originally operated from the terminal. A model of the aircraft, commissioned by Freire’s group, also hangs from the ceiling inside.

"I don't know what the Port [Authority] has in mind as far as the future of the building," Freire said. "I would think that they would want to have some viable use for it, since it's a great terminal, and it's so full of history."