John F. Kennedy International Airport, Jamaica, New York. County/parish: Queens.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places September 07, 2005. NRIS 05000994.
1 contributing building.Also known as:
The TWA Flight Center (also known as the Trans World Flight Center or TWA Terminal) is a building at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in the New York City borough of Queens. Designed by Eero Saarinen and Associates for Trans World Airlines (TWA) and completed in 1962, the building operated as an airport terminal for four decades before being adaptively repurposed as part of the TWA Hotel. The building's main section, the headhouse, is flanked by two wings added for the hotel and is partially encircled by Terminal 5 (T5), a terminal for JetBlue.
The TWA Flight Center has a prominent thin shell concrete roof, shaped like a set of bird's wings and supported by four Y-shaped piers. An open, three-level space with tall windows originally offered views of departing and arriving jets. Two tube-shaped, red-carpeted departure and arrival corridors extended outward from the terminal and connected to detached structures known as "flight wings", which contained the gates. The flight wings were demolished and the corridors were truncated during the development of Terminal 5.
Saarinen's firm was hired to design the terminal as part of a 1955 master plan for Idlewild (now JFK) Airport. After years of design and modeling work, construction began in June 1959, and the terminal was dedicated on May 28, 1962. It originally had one flight wing; Roche-Dinkeloo, a successor firm to Saarinen's company, designed a second flight wing, which opened in 1970. Various other additions took place over the years, and domestic flights were moved to the Sundrome in 1981. After TWA sold its assets to American Airlines in 2001, the terminal closed. There were proposals to refurbish the original structure as an entrance to T5 (which opened in 2008), but they were ultimately abandoned. As part of the TWA Hotel's construction, the headhouse was renovated, and the two hotel wings were constructed, opening in 2019. The original design was widely acclaimed; the interior and the exterior of the headhouse are New York City designated landmarks, and the building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/75321161