Albuquerque Sunport Makeover Takes Flight

In November 2022, construction began upending the upper-floor TSA area, while a team of city staffers rethought the artwork, restaurants, and shops. They drilled down to details, including the choice of the gate areas’ subtly Southwestern carpeting, the addition of USB-ready chairs, and the installation of an array of gleaming tiles in the food court’s restrooms.

Their shared goal: Deliver a microcosm of New Mexico, even to travelers who may only stop through on the way to somewhere else. Some of the results carry well-known names like Sadie’s, Frank’s Famous Chicken & Waffles, the Museum of New Mexico Foundation (MNMF), Laguna Burger, Indian Pueblo Kitchen, Los Poblanos, and Buffett’s Candies. New artworks celebrate the Pueblo Revolt, our incomparable landscapes, and a cosmic sky filled with lowrider airplanes.

Bit by bit, some of these offerings have appeared. The work continues, with hopes of opening all the restaurants and shops by this winter. A revamped observation deck with a new outdoor patio is pegged for early 2027.

“Our big thought, through art and concessions, was to make it local,” says Manny Manriquez, a deputy director of the city’s Aviation Department and leader of the Dream of Flight: Sunport Reimagined project. “The Sunport already felt like it had a strong sense of place; you knew you were in New Mexico. But we thought, let’s plus-up the presence of local artists, distillers, brewers, and retailers, and really make it an authentic New Mexico experience when you’re here.”

Take my chapati. Stuffed with potato masala, onion, and vegan cheese, it was fresh from Rush of Prana, one of the new eateries. Yashoda Naidoo, founder of the Annapurna restaurants in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, says she wanted to bring her brand of Ayurvedic cuisine to the airborne public. “I’ve been traveling on planes since I was two months old, and finding food I could eat in an airport has always been a struggle,” she says.

The Fresquez Companies, which oversees some of the airport’s concessions, reached out to her based on the city’s request for a vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free eatery at the Sunport. Naidoo’s startup menu of wraps, samosas, quinoa bowls, and coconut-milk smoothies will grow as she and her team accustom themselves to opening at 4 a.m. for the first rush of travelers, a schedule she calls “total airport shock.”

“I didn’t believe them when they said there would be a line of people wanting chai at 4:30 in the morning,” she says. “But there are. Now my goal is to go into even more airports.” In doing so, Naidoo will add another page to the robust history of a little airport in a desert town that sputtered to a start, then grew—and grew some more.

ON MAY 15, 1928, the first craft landed on a private, makeshift airstrip south of downtown Albuquerque that came to be called Oxnard Field. By 1929, its three airlines, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), Western Air Express (WAE), and Mid Continent Air Express, moved their operations to an airfield on the city’s West Mesa, where they remained for most of the 1930s.

In 1935, the idea of a grander airport took root. Mayor Clyde Tingley obtained federal Works Progress Administration dollars for a Pueblo Revival–style adobe building near the original airfield and just west of today’s terminal. By then, TAT and WAE had merged to form Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA), which Howard Hughes would outright own by 1939. The oddball aviation pioneer took a strong hand in the new terminal’s look. He admired Taos Pueblo artist Pop Chalee’s paintings and commissioned her to make two. She talked him into 12.

Doug Lutz, who oversees the current airport’s art and music programs, explains this as we stand in the old terminal, looking up at three of Chalee’s pieces depicting Native dances. “We still have 10 of the 12,” he says. “One was damaged beyond repair, and another went missing along the way.” Seven are here, the rest in the main terminal. 

From the baggage claim level, the old terminal, still open to the public, is a short walk west. It holds a handful of offices and occasional special events that benefit from the old-world charm it delivers. Lutz points to two of the original sofas featuring hand-carved wood, plus the gleaming flagstone floor and an inviting fireplace. Massive vigas stretch across the ceiling, each bearing Southwestern designs. A room off the lobby once held a Fred Harvey Company restaurant, the Kachina Room, where Harvey Girl waitresses juggled orders for broiled salmon, Kansas City–style steak, and “Filete con Huevos Rancheros.”

A smaller version of the current terminal opened in 1965 but lacked the jet bridges that carry passengers directly into planes. To get to the airfield and climb portable stairs to their flights, passengers walked through a tunnel decorated with 16 Native-inspired tile mosaics. “The most common comment I hear about the tunnel is from people who remember walking through as children, and they would run their hand along the tiles because it felt so cool,” Lutz says.

The tunnel has achieved mythic status. It closed when a late-1980s renovation added the A and B concourses. Does it still exist? Rumors haunt the internet.

Yes, Lutz assures me, the tunnel lives. He tips his ID badge to a wall-mounted security pad, then plugs in an access code to open a nondescript door near the Delta baggage claim. Across an alley where the real work of the baggage carousels happens, another series of password-protected doors lead us, eventually, to the tunnel. Inside, the lighting feels gloomy. No sounds penetrate the walls. Latter-day utility pipes conceal the east wall’s mosaics, but the ones along the west wall punctuate the tunnel’s 300-foot length. 

Lutz walks me past images that resemble pottery designs, war shields, and dancers with headdresses made of cacti or buffalo horns, each one composed of one-inch-square tiles in a sort of cross-stitch embroidery pattern. “They were done by the airport’s architecture firm, and they have no historical relevance to Native art,” Lutz says. “They were made for the symbolism—inspired by Native art but not created by Native people.”

The tunnel has inspired filmmakers with its moody sense of abandonment and decay. Along with other photogenic spots on the Sunport campus, it’s served as a backdrop for productions like Better Call Saul and The Cleaning Lady. Mayor Keller knows that more people would like a peek inside the tunnel but can only promise to think the prospect over. “It’s problematic because it shortcuts around security,” he says. “It’s a TSA problem.”

From the beginning, the main terminal drew design inspiration from the WPA-era one. That influence is most notable in the 22 vigas that stretch atop the second-floor meet-and-greet expanse of the Great Hall and are carved and painted with images including deer and a thunderbird. Crafted in the Pacific Northwest, the 84-foot-long beams were transported on railcars built to carry Titan missiles, the better to manage wide turns.

That blend of history with modernity prevails in the Dream of Flight renovation, too. The two-tone brick floors, in both the Great Hall and the tunnel, have proved to be both durable and audibly memorable. “When you roll your suitcase, it goes click-click-click,” Keller says. “Some of the suppliers and vendors said, ‘No, get rid of that.’ But those clicks are part of what makes it the Sunport.”

Fred De Guio, author of the 2019 book Albuquerque International Sunport, part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of Aviation series, is a child of the airport industry and worked in it throughout his career. The ever-present history at the Sunport makes it a standout launchpad of the Southwest, he says. Phoenix has demolished two historic terminals. El Paso’s original terminal still stands, De Guio adds, “but they built in front of and behind it. You walk through when you go to the security checkpoint and never realize you were in it. We are pretty unique here in Albuquerque.”

FOR YEARS, THE GREAT HALL was the space you raced through to get up one floor to the restaurants, shops, and inevitable security delays. But when TSA enlarged its operation in 2022, the vendors closed, and people without flight plans were advised to rise no higher than the Great Hall.

The airport has since made it worth coming to that lower floor to welcome people or see them off by adding comfy seats and a Black Mesa Coffee Co. shop that serves a credible green chile quiche, and by moving art installations away from a side wall to center stage.

Display cases there hold up to 900 model airplanes—ostensibly, every type that has landed in Albuquerque, although one case has examples like a British Airways plane that never crossed the Río Grande. De Guio helps with the display, overseen by a group of aviation-history aficionados, the Cavalcade of Wings. Soaring above it is an actual 1914 Ingram-Foster biplane.

“It was a barnstormer in the twenties or thirties, and after its last air show, it ended up in a barn in Texas,” Lutz says. “In the 1970s, somebody finally found it. The story is that they put it back together, added fuel and oil, and it started right up.”

The display helps anchor a collection that has grown to more than 150 pieces representing a museum-caliber roster of artists including Wilson Hurley, Elias Rivera, Fritz Scholder, and Pablita Velarde. The city committed 3.5 percent of the renovation cost to purchasing and commissioning new large pieces that will filter into public spaces as the artists complete them. 

Among the new works, a mixed-media mural from artist J P, We Are of the Mountain, will grace a wall near the start of the TSA area. Virgil Ortiz’s sculpture, Popé, Leader of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, will introduce passengers to Native Futurism near its end. Michael Toya’s Of Skies and Songs mural will cover four sides of the bulkhead in the food court. And the Sky Candy collective of artists, including the nationally lauded Rob Vanderslice, will create up to 12 lowrider airplanes and dangle them above the T connector between the concourses.

“They just knocked it out of the park,” Manriquez says of the collective. “The creativity of doing something no one’s ever done before impressed us, but they’re also doing it in a way that’s very reflective of New Mexico culture.”

Pre-renovation, Lincoln Fox’s Dream of Flight, a 17-foot-long bronze sculpture, held that space. In it, a Native man, with one foot raised, reaches out horizontally to grab onto an eagle, already taking flight. Viewers had to look up to see the figure, and for many of us, the sight always felt like a benediction. The city’s announcement that it would move drew gasps.

But Fox supported its relocation to the food court, where it still soars, but at an approachable level. He warned in advance how hard the move would be. “There’s a steel rod through the body,” Lutz says. “It goes down into the rock he’s on, and then it was tied into I-beams below.” Surrounded by Toya’s mural, it will become a secondary stage for live music. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Lutz schedules a variety of Great Hall performers—from Dixieland jazz to Zuni Pueblo dancers—in front of Hurley’s Sandía Sunset West, kitty-corner to one of Chalee’s paintings on the escalator wall.

A second Chalee work posts up on the other side of the escalators, near Hurley’s companion painting, Sandía Sunset East. The two Chalees moved from the old terminal in 1965, and by the 1980s, in those Dark Ages before indoor smoking bans, they had deteriorated. “The staff was trying to figure out who they could hire to restore them and reached out to Pop Chalee’s grandson,” Lutz says. “He said, ‘Well, why don’t you have my grandmother do it?’ ”

Then in her late 80s, Chalee came to Albuquerque to perform the necessary work.

Before this year’s end, a collection of micro-entrepreneurs aims to set up kiosk-style shops in the Great Hall, with more joining the third floor. Bolstering them are new full-size shops that include the latest outpost of Los Poblanos Farm Shop, the home products of the Santa Fe–based Mountain Standard Time boutique, and the MNMF Shop, which will carry items from the state museums in Santa Fe.

Near the T connector, Duke City Station is set to sell UNM Lobos and New Mexico United gear, Meow Wolf gifts, UNM Press books, treats from Buffett’s Candies, and grab-and-go meals, including Dion’s pizza and Moroccan dishes from Mata G Vegetarian Kitchen.

“We like to consider the Sunport a destination itself,” says Jonathan Small, the Aviation Department’s customer experience manager.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE FORMS the backbone of Gary Gilliard’s work as a deputy director in charge of the new concessions and shops. A seasoned traveler, he often chooses his routes based on which airports he most wants to explore. (Chicago Midway, he says, always beats O’Hare.) He’s especially pumped about the Ascend ABQ pilot program, which oversees the new kiosks but goes one step further than any other airport in the nation.

“We started a bootcamp this summer for 12 small businesses,” he says. “We pair them with business leaders, plus aviation staff.” They learn marketing tricks for airport survival, along with ways to manage their stock and help one another to remain open longer. Turquoise Skies (a jewelry-making shop) and Theobroma Chocolatier are part of the program’s inaugural class. Combined with the larger stores, Gilliard says, “I think this is going to be the most impressive assembly of shops in the nation. I wouldn’t be surprised if we win awards.” The shops and restaurants still close around 8 p.m., but late arrivals should not despair: Gilliard also plans to upgrade the vending machines with tastier and healthier food offerings.

The airport improvements don’t stop at its concessions. Nonstop flights to Nashville and Washington, D.C., have joined the previous 30 destinations, and negotiations are underway to restore the truth to the “international” in the Sunport’s name with flights to Mexico. Giant TV screens already offer colorful temptations to hop on a trail, visit a feast day, or raft a river. Coming soon will be stands that rah-rah the sports teams of New Mexico colleges. Keller also hopes to debut a lecture series that could include a virtual tour of the fabled tunnel.

“Half of this is to get New Mexicans to re-appreciate this place, to feel that they’re home,” he says. “The other half is to get people to stay an extra day, to say, ‘I really want to see Acoma or check out the Sandia Peak Tram.’ ”

Like most travelers, I long ago grew used to arriving early, gutting out TSA, and then fretting about how to spend the leftover time. Manriquez says he and his staff can sympathize. “We encounter people in their most emotional circumstances,” he says. “They’re happy about seeing family or tearful about going to a funeral. Part of the job for us is engaging with the passengers: Where are you going? Why are you visiting?

“The airport is a small city. The Aviation Department has 300 people, and that’s one-tenth of the personnel who work here. We touch the community in a way that’s unique.” Among the 3,000 are maintenance workers and mechanics, janitors and landscapers, ticket agents and pilots, cooks and clerks, baggage handlers and lost-and-founders—and that’s not counting 75 volunteer “ambassadors” who help travelers find their way and sometimes bring certified therapy dogs to calm their nerves. 

To write this story, I visited the Sunport four times in two weeks without once boarding a plane. I grew to hear the hum of all those workers, most of them behind-the-scenes toilers, many of them critical to the life of the airport. I saw nooks I never knew existed and stumbled upon art I never bothered to notice. Throughout, a fundamental question emerged: Why do we travel?

Most of those reasons might fall under business trips, family reunions, and solo adventures. But also, I think, we travel to find ourselves and, sometimes, to escape ourselves—to become something or someone else, even fleetingly. We travel to deepen our comprehension of a world so large while also shrinking it into an object we can take home to define our trip. We embark hungry for the epic journey. We return with a deep-hearted nostalgia, our planes carrying us ever closer to the familiarity we left behind.

A Buddhist would say we are always traveling. The expedition begins at birth and holds many destinations. Pausing next to Sandía Sunset East, I gaze at Hurley’s snowy outlines of rusty crags and cliffs before a sky of purple clouds and think, I want to stand where he stood. 

Upstairs, passengers take flight, but here in the Great Hall, a different voyage starts. 

Read more: The Albuquerque International Sunport is a world unto itself, much more than a means for getting on and off a plane. Here are some tips for maximum enjoyment while you’re there.