Airport spanning California and Mexico opens
SAN DIEGO (AP) – One of the world’s only airports spanning two countries opened Wednesday on a heavily fortified divide separating the United States and Mexico.
The first arrivals came on an Aeromexico flight from Mexico City to the decades-old Tijuana International Airport and walked across a 390-foot (119-meter) bridge to a new $120-million terminal in San Diego.
Target customers are the estimated 60 percent of Tijuana airport passengers who come to the United States, about 2.6 million last year. Until now, they drove about 15 minutes to a congested land crossing, where they waited up to several hours to enter San Diego by car or on foot. The airport bridge is a fiveminute walk to a US border inspector.
“What a difference,” said Elba Hernandez, 69, who flew to Tijuana from Guadalajara after visiting family and walked across the airport bridge to San Diego, where her sister picked her up.
The only other cross-border airport known to industry experts is in the European Union – between Basel, Switzerland, and France’s Upper Rhine region – but it carries none of the political freight of San Diego and Tijuana. Mexicans who ran across the border illegally overwhelmed the Border Patrol until the mid-1990s, when new fences and additional agents heralded a massive surge in US enforcement.
Cross Border Xpress, one of the largest privately operated US air terminals, will charge $18 each way for ticketed passengers. Much of that will go to pay the salaries of US border inspectors.
A group of US and Mexican investors that includes Chicago billionaire Sam Zell expects to make money on a duty-free shop, rental car companies, restaurants and other concessions. The terminal occupies less than half their 55-acre (22-hectare) parcel, and the city of San Diego has approved a 340-room hotel, shopping center and gas station.
An investor group that includes Chicago billionaire Sam Zell built a sleek terminal in San Diego with a bridge that crosses a razor-wire border fence to Tijuana’s decades-old airport. Passengers pay $18 to walk a 390-feet (119-meter) overpass to Tijuana International Airport, a springboard about 30 Mexican destinations.
Target customers are the estimated 60 percent of Tijuana airport passengers who come to the United States, about 2.6 million last year. Now they drive about 15 minutes to a congested land crossing, where they wait up to several hours to enter San Diego by car or on foot. The airport bridge is a five-minute walk to a US border inspector.
Cross Border Xpress, one of the largest privately-operated US air terminals, wouldn’t have happened if Tijuana didn’t build its airport a few steps from the international line in the 1950s or if it wasn’t surrounded by undeveloped land in a barren, industrial part of San Diego.
“It’s an amazing accident of geography,’’ said Stanis Smith of Stantec, Inc., the terminal’s architect. “It could never happen again.’’
The terminal is one of the last works by the late Ricardo Legorreta, whose bold colors helped bring Mexican modernism to a world stage and attracted a strong following in the American Southwest. The stone exterior mixes purple stucco and red limestone that takes on a deep, inky hue when it rains. Stone gardens sprout agave and other desert plants.
Passengers enter a courtyard with a reflecting pool to an airy building with ticket counters and kiosks. High, white ceilings have large orange circles of recessed lighting. Sparse decorative touches are onyx, including high-hanging black slabs near ticket counters and white spheres atop the escalators.
Aesthetics are more dated in the Tijuana airport but passenger flow is the same. Ticketed passengers must carry luggage across a bridge with frosted glass windows to border inspectors in the receiving country and a wall in the middle to separate the two directions.
The idea isn’t new – San Diego leaders proposed an airport with a runway on each side of the border in the early 1990s to replace the city’s constrained Lindbergh Field – but it didn’t gain traction until a Mexican couple invested in 2005 in a company that runs airports in Tijuana and 11 other Mexican cities.