TWA Hotel | |
---|---|
Former names | TWA Flight Center |
General information | |
Status | Completed |
Architectural style | Midcentury modern [1] |
Town or city | New York City |
Coordinates | 40°38′45″N73°46′40″W / 40.64572°N 73.77768°W |
Groundbreaking | December 15, 2016 |
Completed | Early 2019 |
Opened | May 15, 2019 |
Owner | MCR Hotels [2] |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) | Eero Saarinen (original) Beyer Blinder Belle / Lubrano Ciavarra Architects (redesign) |
Other designers | Stonehill Taylor (hotel rooms) INC Architecture and Design (basement event space), Jaros, Baum & Bolles (MEP), Arup Group (Structural) |
Other information | |
Number of rooms | 512 |
Number of restaurants | 6 |
Website | |
www |
TWA Hotel is a hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York City, that opened on May 15, 2019. [3] It uses the head house of the TWA Flight Center, designed by the architect Eero Saarinen and completed in 1962, and two flanking buildings added for the hotel project. It contains a total of 512 rooms, as well as conference space, several restaurants, and an aviation history museum.
TWA Hotel was developed as part of a project to reuse the head house, which had stopped functioning as an air terminal in 2001. The site was developed by MCR Hotels, which operates middle-to-budget hotels in the United States. It is the only hotel operating within the boundaries of JFK Airport.
After the TWA Flight Center closed in 2001, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey sought to redevelop or reuse the terminal. [4] The main building, or head house, was protected from demolition; it had been made a New York City designated landmark in 1994, and subsequently was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. [5] [6] The head house went largely unused until it was ultimately incorporated into an expansion of Terminal 5, [7] which was completed in 2008 and is occupied by JetBlue Airways. [8] [9]
In April 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that JetBlue and hotel developer MCR Development were negotiating for the rights to turn the head house into a hotel. [10] In July 2015, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo confirmed that the Saarinen building would be converted into a new on-site hotel for the airport's passengers. [11]
Groundbreaking took place on December 15, 2016, in a ceremony attended by Governor Cuomo, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz, and former employees of Trans World Airlines. [12] A topping out ceremony for the hotel's first tower was held in December 2017, [13] [14] followed by the topping out of the second tower in March 2018. [15] The next month, a model hotel room built inside a JFK Airport hangar was shown to the press. [16]
That October, Lockheed Constellation L-1649 Starliner N8083H "Star of America" was shipped to the hotel site for conversion into a cocktail bar. The Starliner arrived at the hotel site at the end of November 2018, and in March of 2019 its fuselage was displayed in Times Square. [17] [18] [19] [20]
The hotel started taking reservations in February 2019 in advance of a May opening. [21] [3] The hotel opened on May 15, 2019. [22] [23] [24]
The site was developed by MCR Hotels, which operates middle-to-budget hotels in the United States. It is the only hotel operating within the boundaries of JFK Airport. [25] Beyer Blinder Belle is the architectural firm responsible for renovating the terminal, while Lubrano Ciavarra Architects designed the two new buildings. [5] [26] Stonehill Taylor designed the hotel rooms, [27] [28] [29] and INC Architecture and Design designed the underground event space with 45 meeting rooms and a 7,000-square-foot (650 m2) meeting hall. [28] [29] Arup provided structural engineering, with Jaros, Baum & Bolles delivering MEP services. [30]
Two buildings named Saarinen Wing and Hughes Wing, north and south of the T5 terminal structure, encircle the original headhouse to the east. The two buildings contain a total of 512 rooms between them, [31] as well as conference space, several restaurants, and an aviation history museum. [5] There is a rooftop infinity swimming pool, [3] [32] which is accessible for an additional fee. [32] Also within the hotel is an observation deck with 10,000 square feet (930 m2) of floor space. [33] [31] The developers have a 75-year lease with the state. [12]
Many of the TWA Flight Center's original details, such as the custom ceramic floor tiles and the 486 variously shaped window panels, were replaced with replicas of the originals. [33] [34] These details were intended to give the hotel a 1960s-era vibe, and include brass lighting, walnut-accented furnishings, and rotary phones. The hallways contain red carpeting, evocative of the color of the furniture in the original TWA lounge. However, the rooms also contain modern amenities such as blackout curtains and multiple-pane soundproof windows. [34] [31] The large departure board, a split-flap display made in Italy by Solari di Udine and which has been a feature of the building since the Flight Center's opening in 1962, was fully restored as part of the hotel project. [3] The TWA Hotel also includes a cocktail lounge installed inside a preserved Lockheed L-1649 Starliner, the last model of the Lockheed Constellation line of airliners; the lounge is nicknamed "Connie". [17] [18] The hotel includes the Paris Café, a Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant, as well. [35]
During construction, a sales office and exhibition center, located on the 86th floor of One World Trade Center, [5] was occasionally opened to the public. [26]
In addition, the hotel features a model airport that demonstrates the way the airline's operation center used to look like in the 1960s and 1970s. This model airport was made using TWA model aircraft, runways, and buildings in the 1:400 scale. [36]
In the September 2–9, 2019, issue of Time , the hotel was placed on the magazine's list of "The World's Greatest Places of 2019". [37] The hotel was featured as the cover story in Interior Design magazine's September 2019 issue. [38]
Washington Dulles International Airport is an international airport in Loudoun County and Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, United States, 26 miles (42 km) west of downtown Washington, D.C.
Eero Saarinen was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer who created a wide array of innovative designs for buildings and monuments, including General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan; the passenger terminal at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.; the TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport; and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. He was the son of Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen.
John F. Kennedy International Airport is a major international airport serving New York City, United States. The airport is the busiest of the seven airports in the New York airport system, the 6th-busiest airport in the United States, and the busiest international air passenger gateway into North America. The facility covers 5,200 acres (2,104 ha) and is the largest and busiest airport in the New York City area.
Trans World Airlines (TWA) was a major airline in the United States that operated from 1930 until 2001 when it was acquired by American Airlines. It was formed as Transcontinental & Western Air to operate a route from New York City to Los Angeles via St. Louis, Kansas City, and other stops, with Ford Trimotors. With American, United, and Eastern, it was one of the "Big Four" domestic airlines in the United States formed by the Spoils Conference of 1930.
LaGuardia Airport is a civil airport in East Elmhurst, Queens, New York City. Covering 680 acres (280 ha) as of January 1, 2024, the facility was established in 1929 and began operating as a public airport in 1939. It is named after former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
Philadelphia International Airport is the primary airport serving Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The airport served 9.8 million passengers annually in 2021, making it the 21st busiest airport in the United States. The airport is located 7 miles (11 km) from the city's downtown area and has 22 airlines that offer nearly 500 daily departures to more than 130 destinations worldwide.
St. Louis Lambert International Airport is the primary commercial airport serving metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Commonly referred to as Lambert Field or simply Lambert, it is the largest and busiest airport in the state of Missouri. The airport covers 3,793 acres (1,535 ha) of land. STL is located 14 miles (23 km) northwest of downtown St. Louis in unincorporated St. Louis County between Berkeley and Bridgeton. The airport provides nonstop service to airports throughout the United States and to the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. In 2019, it served nearly 16 million passengers. In 2023 there were more than 270 daily departures to 80 nonstop domestic and international locations.
Albuquerque International Sunport, locally known as the Sunport, is the primary international airport serving the U.S. state of New Mexico, particularly the Albuquerque metropolitan area and the larger Albuquerque–Santa Fe–Las Vegas combined statistical area. It handles around 5.4 million passengers annually and over 400 flights daily. ABQ is located in Bernalillo County, between the Rio Grande and the Sandia Mountains, east of Old Town and Barelas, 3 miles (5 km) southeast of downtown, south of the University of New Mexico and directly to the west of Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base.
The Lockheed Constellation ("Connie") is a propeller-driven, four-engined airliner built by Lockheed Corporation starting in 1943. The Constellation series was the first pressurized-cabin civil airliner series to go into widespread use. Its pressurized cabin enabled commercial passengers to fly well above most bad weather for the first time, thus significantly improving the general safety and ease of air travel.
JetBlue Airways, legally known as JetBlue Airways Corporation and commonly stylized as jetBlue, is a major United States low-cost airline headquartered in the Long Island City neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens. It also maintains corporate offices in Utah and Florida.
Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport is an international airport located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. It is the seventh busiest airport in Canada by passenger traffic, serving 4,094,793 passengers in 2023, and the 7th busiest airport in Canada by aircraft movements. Winnipeg International Airport is a hub for Calm Air, Perimeter Airlines, and cargo airline Cargojet, also serving as a focus city for WestJet and an operating base for Flair Airlines. The airport is co-located with Canadian Forces Base Winnipeg, covering a total land area of 1,370 hectares.
A mobile lounge is a system for boarding and disembarking from aircraft using a bus-like vehicle.
The Sundrome, later TWA Domestic Terminal and Terminal 6, was one of several terminals at John F. Kennedy International Airport. It was designed by I. M. Pei & Partners. Opened in 1969, it was initially used by National Airlines. It had been occupied at various times by Trans World Airlines, Pan Am, United Airlines, ATA Airlines, Pan American Airways (1996–1998), Carnival Airlines, Vanguard Airlines, and America West Airlines. Most recently, from 1998 to 2008, Terminal 6 was the home of JetBlue. It became vacant on October 22, 2008, when JetBlue moved to Terminal 5, and finally demolished in 2011.
The TWA Flight Center, also known as the Trans World Flight Center, is an airport terminal and hotel complex at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York City. The original terminal building, or head house, operated as a terminal from 1962 to 2001 and was adaptively repurposed in 2017 as part of the TWA Hotel. The head house is partially encircled by a replacement terminal building completed in 2008, and flanked by two buildings added for the hotel. The replacement terminal is home to JetBlue's JFK operations. The head house and terminal are collectively known as Terminal 5 or T5.
Ammann & Whitney was a full-service Civil engineering firm that provided design and construction services for public and private sector projects. The firm provided new construction, renovations, adaptive reuse, historic preservation, interior design and sustainable design.
Terminal 5 was an art exhibition that took place in October 2004 at the then disused Eero Saarinen–designed TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport in Queens, New York. The City of New York had designated both the interiors and the exteriors of the Saarinen terminal a historic landmark in 1994, but following TWA's continued financial deterioration during the 1990s and eventual purchase by American Airlines, the Saarinen-designed terminal had ended operations in October 2001 and entered a period of disuse.
The Lockheed L-1649 Starliner was the last model of the Lockheed Constellation line of airliners. Powered by four Wright R-3350 TurboCompound engines, it was built at Lockheed's Burbank, California plant from 1956 to 1958.
The Ramada Plaza JFK Hotel was a Ramada-branded hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport, located in South Ozone Park, Queens, New York City, New York, United States.
MCR Hotels is an American hotel owner-operator. It is the fourth largest hotel owner in the United States by room count, with 25,000 rooms and hotels that include The High Line and TWA hotels.