The first cool airport hotel
A new hotel in the old TWA building right in the heart of JFK wants to restore all the elegant design and sophistication of the Jet Age. Does it measure up?
For my tenth birthday, I asked my mom to drive me to the twa Flight Centre at John F. kennedy airport,
designed by Eero Saarinen, who also designed the St. Louis Arch, so I could take pictures of the place with a disposable camera.
The terminal reopened after much buzz and fanfare as the TWA Hotel. The idea is novel: A welldesigned airport inn that you might actually want to stay at. Most of these sorts of hotels are generally on the drearier side. This one is aiming to be notably hipper. I booked one of its 512 rooms for opening night.
The floor of the lobby was inexplicably filthy with stains, streaks, water-marks and dirt scrapes – I couldn’t tell if it was laziness or a deliberate gesture to preserve the building’s original flooring. The much-touted, runwayscanning infinity pool on the roof was closed (despite assurances that it would be open). The cable feed on my TV was broken and some lights were out in my bathroom. “Restaurants” on site were actually stands in a food court, a majority of which were closed by midevening. A cheese plate I ordered in the admittedly elegant Sunken Lounge never materialised. Most of the elevators seemed to be out of service. The hotel’s managing director looked like he was on the verge of tears – though in his defense, he was very gracious and doing his best in a difficult situation. As one guest said, “A soft opening is one thing.
This is a very, very rough opening.”
Something changed, though, when I encountered a former
TWA employee, one of many who were out in force to celebrate the reintroduction of their beloved old terminal. Her name was Yoli.“today would mark my fiftieth anniversary of working for TWA.”
Near a glass case of memorabilia, I saw a man in what appeared to be an old garage uniform, with a TWA patch at the chest. He seemed to be looking for someone. I stopped him to ask if he’d been an employee. His name was Arthur, and he had been an aircraft mechanic for the airline, who started working for the company before the Eero Saarinen terminal was finished in 1962. He stared out one of the curtain windows at “Connie,” a Lockheed Constellation aircraft placed in-situ in a little courtyard between the hotel and jetblue’s Terminal 5. Arthur knew this machine well. Connie is set to become a themed bar with seating inside, but Arthur remembers her differently. “In 1958, my wife and I flew that exact plane to California.”
Even though the new hotel had scrubbed most of the Jet Age charm from the old building, these conversations resuscitated some of that era’s exquisite, elusive appeal. I might even book a room again here for convenience.
But with the sloppy clinical vibes, the ill-preparedness and the general kind of anticlimactic reaction it created, the TWA Hotel has failed, so far, to pioneer a new, actually cool version of the airport hotel. Maybe that feat is impossible. This project certainly seemed to have the most promise.