Ugly Airports: LAX's 1,000-Foot Walk of Shame

LOS ANGELES (TheStreet) -- At Los Angeles International Airport, the world's sixth busiest airport and the third busiest international gateway in the United States, you would expect terminals and passageways that are stately yet functional.

Instead, if you are walking between terminals five and six, you get a long, narrow corridor bathed in fluorescent light, without windows or clear signage, filled with echoes of conversations and seemingly leading from one dead end to another. The corridor provides first-time users with the sense of being in the wrong place with no option but to continue, as the threat of a missed connection hovers.

In short, you feel lost in a horror movie or, at best, trapped into undergoing a clinical test for elevated stress levels.

Recently Preston Czigans, an Atlanta-area guitarist on his way to a session to record background tracks for commercials, was changing planes when he came upon this seeming passageway to hell. Czigans was flying on Delta (DAL) from Atlanta to San Francisco via Los Angeles.

"I got off the plane at LAX and followed signs," Czigans recalled. "I went down an escalator. It dead-ended at a wall, and you could only turn left into this long, empty hallway. I thought 'I'm not supposed to be here, I'm in the wrong place," but I noticed a few stragglers making the trip down the hallway so I took off walking.

"It was probably about 1,000 feet, a sterile environment with a white floor and white walls with a few pictures that made it look like somebody had started to decorate it, then forgot about it. There was no signage.

"When I got to the end, it was another dead end, with an escalator to go up one story to the terminal," Czigans said. "Sadly, this is a passageway used by countless thousands of travelers every day."

After his trip, Czigans emailed TheStreet because he recalled the story about the five ugliest airports in America, published in December 2010. For that story, the readers we polled selected LAX as the country's fifth ugliest airport.

By the way, if you have any ugly airport photos of your own, don't hesitate to send them to us: