Old Airports

January 8th, 2020
maps, transit
One thing I enjoy about aerial imagery is that you can see traces of how cities used to be. Tracing the spaces left behind by old train lines is a lot of fun, but recently I've been looking at some airports:

Old Saint-Pierre Airport (link), now with housing:

Old Jijiga Airport (link), also with housing, mostly recognizable as a piece of the street grid that doesn't match:

Old Guangzhou Airport (link), barely visible:

Old Quito Airport (link), now a large park and very visible. I think this the airport we used when we visited Ecuador in 2012:

Old Rio Branco Airport (link) is now a road:

Old Austin Airport (link) is very hard to recognize. All the ones above were single-runway, but Mueller airport had two large runways at an angle. Single-runway ones stand out a lot more, but this is still visible as a section of the city that doesn't really fit:

Old Lima Airport (link) closed sixty years ago and has been completely built over. But the runways survive as a pair of crossing roads:

There's a list on Wikipedia but my favorites are ones where I've been looking at an aerial photo and thought "there has to have been an airport there!"

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Body Language For Trans People

When I first came out as trans, resources for trans people were full of advice about body language.

via Thing of Things June 2, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)