TWA Hotel at JFK Airport takes guests back to the 1960s
The ultimate airport hotel takes guests back to the ’60s in style.
I don’t enjoy flying; it’s merely a means to an end. Nor do I like airports, where I absorb the surplus anxiety of travellers with the porosity of a deep-sea sponge. Only one place has made both experiences pleasant and it was neither a flight nor an airport but a New York hotel.
Our JetBlue plane from Florida lands at Terminal 5 and I’ve virtually arrived at my destination already. A few steps from the baggage carousel is an elevator with a glossy silver interior and only two buttons. The first reads “PRESENT DAY JETBLUE” and the second “1960s TWA HOTEL”. We press the latter and go up – and back in time to the golden age of flying.
From 1962, this was the head terminal of Trans World Airlines, one of America’s “big four” and owned by multi-hyphenate and magnate Howard Hughes. As the structure’s Finnish-American architect, Eero Saarinen, was sketching what he called “an abstraction of the idea of flight”, NASA was racing the Soviet Union to be first to send a man into space. When it opened, Saarinen’s design was a wildly futuristic embodiment of America’s ambitions for both air and space travel.
Saarinen did not predict, however, how large aircraft would become and by 2001 the terminal was declared defunct. A few arts and fashion projects swung by but in our hotel-obsessed times, it seemed inevitable that only beds could save it. The twist? Winning bidder MCR Hotels flipped the iconic structure’s chief flaw – it is enveloped by North America’s busiest international airport – into its most fun and fabulous feature.
A red carpet awaits us when the elevator doors part to reveal a tube glowing with soft white light. The aesthetic of directors Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch comes to mind, as does sci-fi film, Gattaca. The Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand is playing but you’re unlikely to bop along holding anything but your bag as it becomes bogged in the heritage-listed carpet. Saarinen designed the flight tube (his phrase) to take TWA customers to their gates but suitcases weren’t on wheels then. I’m OK to go slow, however, for if the elevator is the spine sending us up from Terminal 5, the tube is the artery pouring us into the heart of the ’60s.
Dozens of ex-employees flocked to TWA Hotel’s opening party in 2019, where a former flight attendant told Architect Magazine the terminal “still looks futuristic to me”. It’s true. Sixty years after the concrete was poured into the building’s outstretched wings it feels as if you’re in the future and the past at once. White and bright, with overpasses and stairways that spill into each other, the terminal appears “equal parts liquid and solid”, wrote Architect Magazine. Its curves are akin to the Sydney Opera House sails, the work of another visionary Scandinavian, Danish architect Jorn Utzon, with construction on both buildings starting in 1959.
At the tube’s end is a corridor of luminescent check-in desks, these days, to the hotel; previously, to flights. Back then, passengers weren’t wearing elasticated pants with eye masks and earplugs tumbling from pockets. We feel thoroughly scruffy beside a display of original uniforms dating back to the ’40s. TWA sought top fashion designers to kit out its staff because until 1978, the government regulated ticket prices, which meant airlines couldn’t differentiate by cost. Instead, they lured passengers in with snazzy uniforms, great cocktails and good food. It was enough for Pope John Paul II, who flew TWA exclusively, and was allocated a private room in the terminal designed to direct his gaze heavenwards. Nothing is sacred now though; guests can pop in any time.
But back to those uniforms. The Howard Greer-designed skirtsuit from 1944 has a fold-down tab on its collar to cover the TWA logo – “so there was no brand recognition if she wanted a smoke or a drink”, a hotel employee tells me – while the Valentino skirt could unbutton to reveal hot pants. American designer Stan Herman created TWA’s uniforms in the ’70s, with one abandoned trial involving faux fur coats. “The flight attendants could hardly get through the aisles,” Herman once said. Now aged 93, Herman designed the new hotel’s employee uniforms, testament to how meticulously TWA has embroidered its past into its present.
The original passenger departure area is called the Sunken Lounge and is flanked by bars serving cocktails with names such as Come Fly With Me and Single Engine Spirit. Saarinen’s famous tulip tables sprout from the red carpet while his tulip chairs bloom in the rooms. The lettering of the vintage split-flap Solari display board clatters and clacks, displaying flights on erstwhile airlines such as Pan Am, Braniff International and TWA itself. The music is a strict diet of songs from 1962 to 1969 though it eschews that era’s hard rock, heavy blues and psychedelic byroads for the smooth comfort food of Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey and the Ronettes.
We do dinner at the Paris Cafe, a restaurant in a palette of muted greys and dusty pinks by French-American chef Jean-George Vongerichten. Afterwards, we nip across a simulated tarmac for a warm spiced nightcap on the Lockheed Constellation prop plane commissioned by Hughes in 1939, the “Connie”. The plane is stylish, plush and cosy, with a history that makes your head spin. In 1946, the Connie broke the transcontinental speed record; in the ’50s it served as Air Force One. From mouldering in the weeds of Arizona, to airdropping marijuana in Colombia and rusting away in Honduras, the plane was eventually hauled 480km from Maine, through Times Square, and back to home turf at JFK. We wrap up the evening surrounded by night flights in the rooftop infinity pool, the water steaming in the freezing air.
Until TWA Hotel opened, sleeping at the airport was evidence of either a scheduling catastrophe or bloody-minded pragmatism. Yet here, we are so close to the runway we can see the pilot’s face while having breakfast in bed. It helps that it’s a soundless spectacle. While the decor is purist enough to involve rotary dial telephones, MCR did not go retro on soundproofing. Guests want to see the planes, not hear them, and the floor-to-ceiling windows are seven layers thick, second only to the US embassy in London.
Opening a historical concept hotel was risky but TWA Hotel’s success is in how tastefully it presents the most optimistic highlights of the era, and flying’s golden age. It’s neither museum-like nor kitsch, and is equally as animated by the present as the past. There’s movement everywhere. My peripheral vision flickers with planes on the go and the Airtrain gliding to and fro. A woman in thigh-high boots rolls her designer bag past me, exuding a little ’60s swagger and a whole lot of New York. Rather like the hotel itself.
In the know
TWA Hotel is near Terminal 5 at JFK International Airport, New York. Rooms from $US199 ($274) a night.