The Journal of Failure, Vol. 5

Improbable Time Machines

The Golden Age

JetBlue Terminal 5 at JFK is one of the better of an otherwise desultory selection of buildings housing the various airlines comprising New York’s largest airport. Situated midway around the expressway encircling the grounds, I arrived there one evening some weeks ago, to drop my son off, for him to catch a flight to West Palm Beach. With no particular need to rush back home, I took the opportunity to tour the renovated and repurposed TWA terminal that sits between the building I was presently in and the parking structure situated across the way.

TWA Flight Center, circa 1962

Reaching back to when air travel was considered an exclusive and glamorous pastime, the airport that eventually became JFK lived up to the ideals of the era with terminals representing some of the more inspired architectural standouts of the time. Foremost among them was the TWA Flight Center. Designed by Eero Saarenin and opened in 1962, the terminal was a sculptural masterpiece, resulting from the architect’s signature of applying technology in the service of evoking organic forms balanced between the figural and the abstract; the result, in this instance, was intended to recall Leonardo DaVinci’s Flying Machine, but has more often been compared to a bird in flight or a bat. Below the swooping concrete form, the front of the building featured windows stretching from floor to ceiling, filling the negative space created by the lofting wings rising above the concrete shoots extending away from either side of the building. In the rear, framed by the outstretched concrete tunnels that reach from the terminal outwards towards the gates, a window stretches across the back of the terminal, affording a panoramic view of the entire airfield.

The interior of the building consists of unobstructed space to better highlight the exposed concrete and undulating form of the building’s exterior. The usual amenities that are normally immediately visible are are instead placed discretely within the contours of the architecture, with those of the second floor: two restaurants and a lounge, set towards the center of the structure, where they are unseen from below and are accessed by an elegant, curving catwalk that reaches to the ground by way of two sinuous staircases, touching down opposite of each other, forming an elegant parabola. The other services: restrooms, a newstand, a shoe shine and the Ambassador Lounge, are all tucked away beyond the sitelines of the first floor, so that nothing, but travelers moving through space, become a painterly component that incorporates into the architecture. The overall effect is evocative of having entered into a particularly well described piece of utopian fiction.

My father traveled regularly for business and flew almost exclusively on TWA. His company bought surplus electronics and his work entailed visiting manufacturers to negotiate for their unwanted inventories. Picking him up at the airport was a regular occurrence for us as a family. Typically, his flight would arrive in the late evening. My mother would dress up to meet him, pack my sister and I unbelted into the car and drive us away from our home, the sound of WINS “All news. All the time,” filtering into the back seat as we drove south towards the Belt Parkway. As we got close to the airport, the acrid smell of jet fuel, accompanied by the drone of jet engines, would begin to penetrate our senses. We would park the car ahead of the outsized, bird-like structure, glowing from its interior; and walked across the parking lot through the night air.

We'd enter the building to be confronted by a large sculptural form that rose perhaps, eight feet, and looked as though it could have been carved by the British sculptor, Henry Moore. Around the other side of the sculpture, embedded into the stone, was an oval departures/arrivals board. Looking directly across the terminal, the identical sister board was suspended from the panoramic window, stretched across the rear of the terminal. Both were state-of-the-art “split-flap displays”. Their distinct clacking sound nearly constant as they changed on a nearly constant basis. Their sound permeated the terminal with a slightly out-of-synch dissonance that resonated throughout the cavernous space.

We would stand in front of the forward board craning our necks upwards, invariably noting that we had arrived at least an hour early, reinforcing a well established family tenet that punctuality was the coin of our realm.

Most of the time that I would spend waiting for my father to come walking down the long crimson carpeted corridor, arching from the gate, up and over towards where we were waiting, would be spent exploring that same terrain, while my mother and sister wandered around the newstand adjacent to the tunnel or else they sat in the large central lounge area. Generally, I would be the one to pick him out from the crowd of fatigued London Fog-attired businessmen. I would have spent the better portion of an hour inside of the red tube, my anticipation heightened as the first travelers started to wander down towards me. Finally, having located him somewhere in the middle of the pack, I would lead him to the rest of the family and we would make our way back through the terminal, back into the night air, the noise and the smell of the fuel returning in sharp focus. We would load back into the car, the radio silent. His weariness would abate some by the time we had left the airport and he would begin to recount to my mother, in a low voice, the details of his trip.

To arrive at the TWA Hotel from the bustling main floor of the JetBlue terminal, one needs to take the escalator from check-in, down to baggage claim, to the small elevator tucked behind the carousels which opens into the gently arched concrete tube that originally spanned the distance between the terminal and the gates and which now attaches JetBlue’s baggage claim to the revitalized Saarenin building.

The two buttons inside the elevator to the hotel read: JetBlue Terminal 5, Present Day; TWA Hotel, 1962. I pushed the button for the decade of my birth.

The door opened into a space that hadn’t entered my consciousness since I had been deciphering trench coats for the one that bore my father. It seemed that I had briefly shed my 57 year old body and found myself returned to the boy who ran up and down that same long red ramp, searching for the bushy hair and seventies-style mustache that he wore, waiting for him to come around the corner where uniformed attendants guarded the gates.

I became unmoored in time with the two eras oscillating between my past and present. For the brief time that the experience lasted  I was completely  lost in time, unable to distinguish the reality in which I was existing.

I exited the ramp, the disorienting temporal effects of the moments just before having worn off,  my bearings mostly reclaimed. I re-entered the expanse of the main terminal, unsure if my  familiarity with the space might trigger further episodes. I wandered aimlessly throughout the building  feeling something between anxious trepidation and anticipation. After my second lap around the building, I realized that I wasn’t going to have a second bite at the altered-consciousness apple and found myself a seat facing the panoramic window, looking out towards the airfield, the gentle clacking of the split-flap displays echoing in the background.