ab2013

Grew up in the Detroit metro - McNamara is definitely one of the best terminals in the country - happy 20th to it! It sure has aged really well.

Side note: Pictures of the Davey Terminal are kinda hard to find, I think. I have very vague memories of it because I was still very young/little at the time - but I remember the few times I flew through it, my parents had a ritual of picking up food at a Burger King's (french toast sticks were a favorite) and grabbing dessert at Cinnabon before boarding a (typically) morning flight. That's basically the only good feeling that I have left of the Davey Terminal. Obviously, that ritual stopped when the Davey Terminal closed - Cinnabon (still) isn't a thing at the McNamara Terminal. Maybe I'm wrong, but my gut feeling is that the vendor selection at McNamara is a bit more upscale than what the Davey Terminal had, but I also remember very little about Davey.

DCAproducer

I went to college just south of Toledo and DTW, on TWA, was my airport for flights home to STL. I was working in Toledo when McNamara opened and wow what an improvement. It's still one of the best terminals in the world. Oddly, I've never been in the other new terminal.

xliioper

Someone dug up a few online shots inside Davey in this post -- https://www.airliners.net/forum/view...3263#p21872867
There's some other pics and some postcards in the main thread -- https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1433263
Photos inside of Smith are easier to find including a Youtube walkthrough video from 2014 after it had been closed since 2008 -- Would be fun to step back in time to 1959 and have a drink in the "Continental Rm." in Smith -- https://detroithistorical.wordpress....-airports-iii/

Detroiter

Some cool pics there. I moved to the Detroit area in 1978, and both terminals were entirely adequate for the scale of traffic at DTW at that time. It was only after the explosion of traffic after deregulation and the creation of the RC and then NW hubs that exposed the limitations of the designs of the Smith and Davey terminals, but then no terminal designed in the 50s-70s was really designed to facilitate hub operations. DTW was fortunate in having space to build two entirely new terminals rather than wrapping redesigned terminals on the skeletons of the old terminals as MSP and PHL did. I particularly enjoyed the tour of Smith, since most of my flying until NW took over Davey was out of Smith on AA, NW, and DL.

I don't know about the Continental Room, but there was a decent traditional airport steaks-and-chops restaurant in the Smith terminal where the hallway behind the ticket counters met the entrance to B concourse where I ate once, at the end of my day of interviews for the job that brought me to Detroit. Ford gave me some cash for dinner, which I proceeded to spend on a steak and a couple of cocktails. By the way, my flight back to Purdue that evening was in a Swearingen Metro (20-passenger turboprop) on Air Wisconsin. Two hours DTW-Lafsayette, with an intermediate stop in FWA. The only flight I've had that I would compare unfavorably to a flight in a CRJ-200. Small, cramped, and noisy. Sort of made up for by the fact there was no separation between the cabin and the cockpit, so there was a pilots' eye view of the landing at LFT, but still damned uncomfortable.

ND76

I grew up in west Michigan between 1963-72, having arrived there as an eight year old. One thing I remember about the state was that they named roadside rest areas after obscure bureaucrats in the state highway department. Who exactly were Smith and Davey? At first, I thought they named the McNamara terminal after Senator Patrick McNamara, who was in office until his death circa 1966; it turns out that it was named after Edward McNamara, then the Wayne County Executive.

As for airport restaurants, I remember getting to eat at Drelles' Horizon Room in the MKG airport, which was considered to be one of the finest restaurants in west Michigan circa 1970. MKG was a fairly busy airport in those days, with several flights from both North Central and United every day. MKG had real "gates"; to get to your plane, you walked out the airport door and to and through a gate in the cyclone fence that separated the viewing area from the airport apron.

xliioper

I suspect the Continental Room was lost at some point fairly early on among the many renovations of Smith. FWIW, I found a higher res picture and realized that what the Detroit Historical Society refers to as the "Shark Bar" is pretty clearly just a "Snack Bar" (look at the letter 'r' in the word 'Bar' which does not match the 'c' in 'Snack').