Leonardo Slept Here

Back before the events of the world made it such a cauldron of suspicion and fear, I used to spend more time than most people would consider normal at New York's biggest airport.  Despite passing three other airports to get there, JFK had a unique appeal for me and my similar plane-geek friends.  Part of that is the international stew that passes through it (over 90 carriers call there, albeit many of them only a few flights a week).  But another aspect is its unique layout.  In the 1950s and 60s, the developers of the airport only constructed one terminal on their own, which served mainly the aforementioned overseas carriers who had a small presence.  The major players at the time (American, BOAC, Eastern, National, Pan Am, TWA, and United) were each allocated land to design and build their own facilities. Northwest Orient, Braniff and Northeast Airlines opting to share one building that later became home to Delta Air Lines.

Pan Am Worldport
Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., photographer
in the Public Domain

Of particular architectural interest were the facilities operated by Pan Am and TWA.  The former, once known as the Worldport, is an oval capped by a four-acre cantilevered  roof which allowed passengers to enter and leave aircraft while sheltered from the weather. Expanded in 1970 to accommodate Boeing 747s, it was for a time the largest passenger terminal in the world.

The TWA Flight Center, designed by Eero Saarinen, still stuns visitors with its unique profile.  A thin-shell concrete structure which evokes a bird in flight.  Opened in 1963, it introduced travelers to such niceties as the Jetway boarding bridge, a central PA system, and an electronic flight display board.

By the early 1990s these buildings were all bursting at the seams and barely able to cope with the volume of traffic passing through them.  Piecemeal renovations occurred on each facility.  Used by Delta since Pan Am's demise, the Worldport is often compared unfavorably to terminals in the developing world. It is  slated to be demolished by 2014.  A consortium of airlines replaced the Eastern terminal with a state-of-the-art facility that can accommodate the superjumbo A380.  American built a giant new structure and leveled both its original building (which included destroying the world's largest stained-glass window) and that of United, whose presence at JFK has been reduced to just a handful of flights now operating out of the British Airways facility.  I.M. Pei's glass-curtained "Sundrome," which housed jetBlue until a few years ago, is also slated to come down to make room for that carrier's future expansion.

The main terminal has also been replaced, and will be expanded to accommodate Delta over the next few years, thus vacating the Worldport.


TWA Flight Center by Eric Alix Rogers 2009
The TWA Flight Center is now on the National Register of Historic Places.  Its unique shape and the inability to alter it made it impractical for today's requirements.  When American Airlines consumed TWA in 2001, the terminal was closed.  

Since then jetBlue built a new facility partially surrounding it on the airside, which required demolition of the two gate satellites, but the two buildings are joined by the two original ovid walkways in which we see Leonardo DeCaprio, in character as master con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. in Catch Me if You Can.

Airside of the TWA Flight Center
by Timothy Vogel (Vogelium on flickr.com)
Used by Creative Commons License

Since then, nobody has quite figured out what to do with this very cool, but not particularly useful building.  As we have learned the hard way, airports don't make the best museums.  Part of the attraction for us (besides the bar, natch) of this space was the view of the tarmac, which has since been obstructed by the construction of the new jetBlue terminal. 
  
The latest proposal is to construct a boutique-sized hotel (approximately 150 rooms) in the space between the old and new buildings.  I'm not sure how they plan to accomplish this without further compromising the setting of the Saarinen structure.  The airside is currently a gravel field, but at least that admits daylight into the cavernous waiting area.  Sticking another building in there would gobble up even more of the already-limited atmosphere.  A hotel on the airport property would be a good thing (the vaguely prisonlike Ramada Plaza out by the Belt Parkway closed several years ago) but I'm not sure wedging it into this  space is the best plan, and I'm not alone.

Stewardess, is There Something You're Not Telling Us?

Laurence - Deacon and Martyr (258)

Of course I could not pass up the opportunity to write about yesterday's most bizarre news story.  In case you just emerged from seclusion and therefore missed it, a jetBlue flight attendant named Steven Slater yesterday attempted to prevent a passenger from retrieving her carry-on suitcase from an overhead bin while the plane was still taxiing towards the gate.  In a string of circumstances the details of which are not 100% clear, the passenger apparently swore at Slater and the bag in question hit him in the face.  At which point Slater snapped.

The general summary seems to be that Slater grabbed the microphone and excoriated the offending passenger over the public address system, then grabbed his own carry-on bag and exited the plane via a still-armed door and thus deploying the escape slide.  

"But what makes him an instant legend, of course, is the beer. He grabs the beer on the way out. That's the Animal House meets Airplane! note. No wonder he's an instant Internet icon. His name will become a verb, just watch."  

- WASHINGTON POST BLOGGER JOEL ACHENBACH

And it's true.  On Facebook, which has become the bench in front of the general store, the waiting area of the beauty parlor and the corner bar all at the same time, my "wall" was abuzz this morning with people weighing in on Slater's stunt.  Hero, some said.  Silly queen, opined others (the Daily News seemingly went out of its way to play up Slater's homosexuality as if that caused his behavior).

But reading the news today it seems as if the overwhelming majority of the population -- even in the airline industry -- sympathizes with Slater, especially as It emerged that the same passenger hit Slater in the forehead with the door to the luggage bin before the plane left Pittsburgh.  Bartenders, hairdressers and office drones have weighed in on their own inclinations to "pull a Slater" when a customer or boss pushed them too far.   And the customers, stressed about their jobs, their tax bills and the general malaise that still seems to hang over our country, are easily riled too. Leaves you to wonder how far behind Slater on the chute many of us are.  Just tonight, a friend and I were in a store and witnessed an out-and-out screaming match between two employees and a customer.  We did not hear what triggered it but we hightailed it out of there before the cops arrived.

It really makes me wonder whether everybody ought to take a deep breath and reset their priorities.  As cliched as it sounds, we're all in this together. Would it kill you to wait another 30 seconds to get your bag?  I'm guessing not.