To get to the air-traffic-control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, you have to walk through Concourse D in the Central Terminal, past the shiny shops and fat pretzels and premium brews, into and back out of streams of travelers yammering wirelessly at wives, lovers, brokers. You come to a thick steel battleship-gray door, shove it open with your hip. Step inside. You are now in…Leningrad? Bucharest? Cinder-block walls washed in dingy fluorescent light, a cramped elevator, slow and rickety, up to the tenth floor—Sorry it’s so cold, but this thermostat hasn’t worked for shit in years—through another gray door, up a knee-creaking set of concrete stairs: Welcome to the LaGuardia tower cab. Would you like a doughnut? Check out the view! The skyline demands all of you first, Manhattan spreading unobstructed like a mural written on the bottom of the sky. Airplanes everywhere, white, silver crawling. Rikers Island sits alone on the upwind leg of runway 31. Shea Stadium, on the opposite end, is mere skeleton and guts, just now on a crisp fall morning coming undone. You don’t see a view like this every day. Never mind the furniture, the duct-taped Archie Bunker couches in the break room, the ragged fold-up tables and the ancient, empty vending machine advertising Mike and Ike for twenty-five cents. Never mind the missing ceiling tiles, the warped paneling, the chipped Formica, the spectacular curls of peeling paint. Taped to the handset of a red phone is a sign reading BLACK PHONE. Some of the computer equipment brings to mind the days of Tandy and Heathkit. Some sections of the control console bring to mind the golden age of telephone operators wearing pointy bras. For a long time the roof here leaked so badly they had giant diapers hanging, tarps tacked from here to there to catch the water; a garden hose took the water down a flight of stairs to a janitor’s sink. Sometimes the bathroom plumbing goes, and when it goes it really goes; some controllers keep an extra shirt in their lockers in case of explosion. (Others have learned to flush with their foot and duck.) But check out the view! people here say with pride—intent or not intent on masking the obvious. Yeah, this place is a dump. This is the center of the universe, a tower serving 23 million passengers a year as they fly in and out of the most congested airspace in the world, and yeah, this tower, built in 1962, one of the oldest in America, is a dump.

The FAA promises a new tower next year. You can see it emerging next to the parking garage. It’s right there. Some LaGuardia controllers remember hearing about a-new-tower-next-year as far back as 1984. “Next year.” “Next year.” “Why fix up the old tower when a new tower is coming next year?” A quarter of a century of no next-years is enough to make any worker with a spare shirt in his locker in case of toilet explosion feel…skeptical.

Cali loves it here; it sounds crazy at first, but he does love it. (In fact, most LaGuardia controllers kiss the mud-colored carpet tile they walk on. They could tell you about the alternatives. Stick around and they’ll tell you about the alternatives.) At the moment, Cali is on Ground. It’s 8:20 A.M. on a Friday, rush hour, every forty-five seconds another airplane landing, then another launching, then another landing, relentless as throbs of a throbbing headache. Twenty-six departures wait in line, all stoked up, backed up on Bravo clear down to Foxtrot. Twelve controllers maneuver the chaos. Brian is on Local, clearing for takeoff and clearing for landing, while Cali, on Ground, is managing the taxiways—a constantly moving puzzle of airplanes loaded with thousands and thousands of souls. Of all the positions, almost everyone here loves Ground most, because it’s so fucking complicated. LaGuardia Airport is tiny compared to its sleek modern counterparts, like Atlanta or Denver with their endless parallel runways spread over thousands of acres. LaGuardia is jammed into just 680 urban acres; taxiways are tight; runways intersect; you can’t launch a departure until the arrival on the other runway crosses the threshold or else the airplanes will…collide. There’s also water on three sides to avoid falling into. There’s also adjacent behemoths Newark and (especially) Kennedy airports, each launching and landing one plane every thirty-six seconds, constantly breathing down LaGuardia’s neck. Kennedy, just twelve miles south, is obnoxious. If Kennedy goes into delays, it’s LaGuardia that has to change its runway configuration to help Kennedy get out of delays. All in all, the complications make this place so much more awesome than a place like Atlanta or Denver. This, anyway, is the LaGuardia mystique. This dump rocks.

Cali sends a Dash 8 into the departure lineup, feels the thunder of a launching 757 soaring past the tower windows. He’s keeping an eye on an Embraer jet and gate Charlie 9. He has a lot on his mind. His first name is Tom, but the guys call him Cali. He plays hockey. He used to be a short-order cook. He is proud of his gardens, especially his enormous orange canna lilies. His hair is buzzed, and his eyes are smart, and his nose is prominent, and his accent is Long Island. His movements are impatient gesticulation, yadda yadda yadda. His headset cord is long, enabling him to wander practically the full circle of the cramped tower cab. Like nearly everyone else here, he stands when he’s on position. It’s not a sit-down kind of job. “Swivelheads” is a nickname for tower controllers, because they’re constantly scanning in all directions, like owls.