The TWA Hotel Lands at JFK

The 1950s and '60s are romanticized as the Mad Men era -- the "great America" that so many people want to somehow, spiritually and socio-economically return to; a time when people knew their place i.e. white men in power, blacks at the back of the bus, gays in the closet, and women either in the kitchen or only working as secretaries, nurses, and teachers.

'Dose were da' days!

It was a time when it was great to be a "mad man" -- oh yes, you could have three martini lunches, smoke everywhere, and bang your secretaries with abandon (no annoying sexual harassment laws or HR rules or hashtags to kill the fun).

It was white male nirvana.

Then there was the architecture. Lots of gorgeous but decaying buildings were being torn down at this time and replaced by boring Bauhaus inspired-monstrosities. Function, not beauty, dictated architectural style. And brand new diners (remember those?) and airport terminals were opening and they looked weird -- lots of curves and arched ceilings and warped roofs -- like spaceships out of Forbidden Planet.

One such prime NYC example was the TWA Terminal at JFK airport that opened in 1962.

It was a huge, hulking sweep of curves and open spaces, blindingly white, and it feels very 1960s post-modernesque. It was a functioning terminal for decades until TWA went out of business and the terminal closed in the early 2000s. It sat empty, ready to be bulldozed, until some developers bought and decided to turn it into a hotel.

And now the hottest new hotel in town is far from midtown Manhattan -- it's in southeast Queens!

Today the new TWA Hotel opens to much fanfare. It's obviously a massive, expensive undertaking ($300+ million) with a myriad of rooms starting at $250 a night. There are expensive restaurant (Jean-Georges has one there) plus luxury retail stores, and a 150 person bar inside an airplane tethered to the hotel. Everything is luxury and luxuriously kitschy -- taking something that was once plebian and turning it into something grand. Apparently the owners of this new hotel have huge ambitions for it, they think it'll have nonstop full capacity, and that travellers to and from JFK will want to pony up that much money to spend the night before either flying out or after having landed. 

Either the new TWA hotel will be a huge success or a colossal failure. I'll be watching its fate with keen interest.

Sidenote: I almost exclusively flew on TWA to and from college back in the 1990s. As I mentioned yesterday, I just passed the 20th anniversary of my college graduation so this nostalgia-themed hotel opening today is somehow -- le sigh -- appropriate.

It's just reminder that the present becomes the past quickly, today's ordinary stuff becomes tomorrow's cherished relics, today's noise becomes tomorrow's history, today's frustrations becomes tomorrow's nostalgia.

It was ever thus and forever shall be.