TWA Hotel - Where JFK's Runway Meets a Retro-Futurist Fantasy

There is an infinity pool on the roof of a building at JFK Airport, heated to 95 degrees in winter, 19 meters long, looking directly out over one of the busiest runways in North America. You can sit in the water and watch a Lufthansa A380 rotate into a gray Queens sky while drinking something called a Jet Fuel.

The building beneath the pool is Eero Saarinen's 1962 TWA Flight Center - a continuous curved concrete shell that looks less like a terminal and more like something poured from a great height and left to settle. No interior columns interrupt the sweep of the ceiling. The penny-tile floors were laid one thumb-press at a time. The original split-flap departures board - a Solari di Udine mechanical marvel manufactured in Italy - still clatters in the lobby, now advertising cocktail specials alongside actual flight times.

MCR Hotels opened the TWA Hotel inside Saarinen's headhouse in 2019, adding 512 soundproofed guestrooms across two flanking wings. It is the only hotel within the actual boundaries of JFK, and somewhere inside, past the airplane turned cocktail bar on the tarmac and the room where two popes once rested in gold-padded privacy, there is a Twister room.

Skytrax ranked it North America's best airport hotel in both 2024 and 2025. The TWA Hotel is, without apology, a great deal of fun.

A Terminal That Refused to Die

The TWA Flight Center opened in 1962 as the crown jewel of Trans World Airlines, the carrier that eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes had transformed into Hollywood's preferred way to cross the country. Saarinen - the Finnish-American architect behind the Gateway Arch in St. Louis - designed the terminal at what was then called Idlewild Airport as a physical argument for the romance of flight. Its parabolically curved concrete shell, all organic swoops and structural daring, was less building than manifesto.

TWA collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001, and the terminal went dark. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had designated it a New York City landmark in 1994, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, which protected the building from demolition but didn't immediately solve the problem of what to do with it.

JetBlue eventually incorporated the headhouse into its Terminal 5 expansion in 2008, but the building sat in architectural limbo until 2015, when MCR Hotels and MORSE Development struck a 75-year lease deal with the Port Authority. Groundbreaking happened in December 2016, with the hotel opening in May 2019.

The renovation was extraordinarily detailed. The 486 variously shaped window panels were replaced with precise replicas. The custom ceramic floor tiles were reproduced one by one. MCR worked with 174 firms and 22 government agencies on the project. It is the only hotel operating within the actual boundaries of JFK Airport.

Connie: A Checkered Life, an Excellent Martini

Of everything at TWA Hotel, the Connie cocktail lounge is the one that makes people stop and stare. Parked on the hotel tarmac, a 1958 Lockheed Constellation L-1649A Starliner - tail number N8083H - has been converted into a 75-seat bar. Departures magazine named it one of the best hotel bars in the world, and it's hard to argue once you're sitting in a restored 1950s airplane seat with a Vodka is My Co-Pilot in hand, watching actual planes taxi past the window.

Connie's biography is more dramatic than most. She came off Lockheed's production line in 1958 and joined TWA's Jetstream fleet, flying passengers in a cabin decorated with murals by artist Mario Zamparelli - eight-by-four-foot paintings depicting 25 global destinations that now decorate the restored bar.

She was retired when the Boeing 707 arrived, carrying 132 more passengers at 300 mph faster. After commercial retirement, she shuttled supplies to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, was sold at auction in 1979 for $150, and by the early 1980s had been modified to airdrop marijuana before getting stuck in the mud with a damaged propeller at a remote Colombian landing strip.

She was eventually abandoned in Honduras, rescued by a Maine aviation enthusiast in 1986, and bought by a German aviation charity in 2007, which stripped her for parts before reconsidering. MCR eventually had her transported to JFK - including a memorable tour through Times Square in early 2019 - and restored her to her current life as one of New York's more improbable places to have a drink.

The cockpit features an authentic original navigation system and a live feed to air traffic control. The bar is open seven days a week from 4 PM to 10:30 PM.

The Sunken Lounge: Cocktails in the Thick of History

At the center of the original Saarinen terminal sits the Sunken Lounge, a dramatically proportioned pit of curved banquettes, original Chili Pepper Red carpet, and authentic white penny tile. Overhead, the restored Solari split-flap board click-clacks through a rotating display of messages.

The menu leans into 1960s cocktail culture: the Vodka is My Co-Pilot appears here alongside original house cocktails like the Jet Fuel, and swizzle sticks modeled after TWA's original sets - each highlighting a travel destination or element of the airline's fleet - make every drink a minor piece of memorabilia. The lounge is open Monday through Thursday and Sunday from 11 AM to 11 PM, and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.

What those windows overlooked in 1965 is worth noting: crowds gathered in the Sunken Lounge to watch the Beatles arrive in the United States for the first time.

The Paris Café: Champagne Chicken at 30,000 Feet (Conceptually)

The Paris Café by Jean-Georges occupies the entire footprint of the terminal's original Paris Café and Lisbon Lounge - spaces once designed by Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer responsible for the 1955 Coca-Cola contour bottle, the 1959 TWA twin globes logo, and the livery of Air Force One.

The menu was developed after the hotel's team researched historic TWA in-flight menus from the airline's peak years. Champagne chicken was apparently a real thing people ate at altitude.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten - who has held Michelin stars for 14 consecutive years and operates over 60 restaurants globally - describes the Paris Café as a return to the culinary glamour of the era. Reservations are recommended but walk-ins are welcome. The restaurant has no dress code, though it draws a firm line at swimwear.

The Flight Tubes

One of the more quietly spectacular features of the building is the pair of original flight tubes connecting the TWA Flight Center to JetBlue's Terminal 5. These enclosed glass walkways - sleek, low-slung tunnels running at ground level - were part of Saarinen's original design, intended to funnel passengers toward their departure gates.

Walking through them now, with the hotel's retro-futurist aesthetic on one side and an active 21st-century airport terminal on the other, is a genuinely strange experience in the best possible way. It's the point where the building's two lives collide most visibly.

The Pope's Room

Inside the Ambassador Lounge sits a small, padded, gold-hued room that most people walk past without knowing what they're looking at. This was the private rest space used by Pope Paul VI when he visited the United States in 1965, and subsequently by Pope John Paul II during his American visits in 1979, 1987, and 1995.

TWA, during its peak years, was the airline that flew the Vatican's transatlantic itineraries, and the room - cozy, quiet, lined in padded gold walls - was designed to give the papacy somewhere to decompress between the airport and the wider world. It has been restored and is accessible as part of the hotel's Ambassador Lounge.

The Future as It Looked in 1962

Even without staying the night, the TWA Flight Center justifies the trip. Saarinen designed the headhouse as a continuous curved concrete shell supported by four Y-shaped pylons, allowing the roof to swoop and cantilever dramatically overhead with no columns interrupting the interior.

The effect is of being inside something organic - a space that doesn't feel engineered so much as grown. The building was designed before jet bridges were standard, when boarding a plane was itself theatrical, and Saarinen's architecture treated it accordingly.

The hotel's public spaces are free to enter, and the building rewards repeated attention: a corner you've walked past twice suddenly reveals a new angle that changes your understanding of the whole.

The original details that survive, or have been meticulously recreated, include penny tile floors laid one thumb-press at a time, dramatically angled window panels, terrazzo surfaces, and the sculptural staircases that cascade toward the Sunken Lounge.

The commitment to the period runs through everything. The hotel has its own proprietary typeface - Flight Centre Gothic. Hallways are lined with red carpet pulled from the original TWA lounge palette. Guestrooms contain working rotary phones, Eero Saarinen-designed Knoll furnishings, and actual back copies of LIFE magazine on the coffee tables. Womb chairs in TWA red appear throughout the public areas.

The Museum

The New-York Historical Society - founded in 1804 and New York's oldest museum - curated the hotel's exhibition spaces, which are free and always open to the public. The collection runs to 2,367 accessioned artifacts, including 65 complete TWA uniforms spanning 1945 to 2001, 62 original David Klein travel posters, 338 dining service items, and 247 in-flight amenities from an era when airlines gave passengers gilded playing cards and silver serving ware.

Former TWA employees and their families donated many of the items - photographs, letters, personal effects, including an autograph given to a flight attendant by passenger Kirk Douglas. MCR hired an archivist to catalog and preserve the collection, and conducted research at the TWA Museum in Kansas City, Yale University's Saarinen archives, and the Port Authority, which donated original blueprints.

Among the exhibits are period-perfect recreations of both Saarinen's and Hughes's offices, a 1962 living room where you can try on retro fashions, and a 1:400-scale diorama of the TWA Flight Center as it appeared in the early 1970s, down to the ramp grease marks. It was built by Florida-based aviation enthusiast Brian Keene and is permanently displayed in the lobby.

The Rooms

The 512 guestrooms are divided between the Saarinen Wing and the Hughes Wing, two seven-story buildings wrapping around the original headhouse. They come in 16 configurations, from standard kings to a Howard Hughes Presidential Suite overlooking Runway 4 Left/22 Right.

Every room is soundproofed to an extraordinary degree: the towers' facades are built from 2,055 thick curtain wall panels, and all windows are multi-paned. You can watch a 747 rotate at full thrust 200 yards away and hear nothing more than ambient hotel quiet.

The Executive King Suite with Historic TWA View looks out directly onto the Saarinen terminal. Inside: a king bed, a sitting area furnished with Eero Saarinen-designed pieces, floor-to-ceiling windows with blackout shades, a terrazzo-tiled bathroom with a Hollywood-style vanity, a custom crystallized glass and walnut desk, a retrofitted vintage Western Electric 500 rotary phone with unlimited local and international calls, and a hidden in-room safe.

The windows are, the hotel notes with some pride, the second-thickest in the world. If you can't stay overnight, the Daytripper package offers room rentals from 6 AM to 8 PM for a minimum of four hours - a practical solution for long connections that beats any airport lounge.

Plane Spotting From the Infinity Pool

The rooftop Pool Bar runs daily from 11 AM to 11 PM, serving cocktails and food year-round. Between May 1 and November 1, reservations are required and each session runs for one hour and 45 minutes.

Hotel guests can swim without a reservation between 7 AM and 10:45 AM regardless of season, and outside of the peak season, the cover charge is waived entirely. No outside food or beverages, no tripods, no live streaming - JFK Airport security requirements apply even on the roof.

The rooftop infinity pool was inspired by the pool at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera, which is an aspirational reference point for a pool in Queens - but the view makes the comparison feel less absurd than it should.

The pool overlooks Runway 4 Left/22 Right - 12,079 feet of active tarmac serving 70-plus airlines - with sightlines stretching all the way to Jamaica Bay. It runs 19 meters long, features a beach entry and underwater seating, and carries a TWA logo mosaic in the airline's signature gold and red at its base.

In winter, the pool is heated to 95 degrees daily. The water is filtered every 30 minutes, against a standard pool's six-hour cycle. From the adjacent observation deck, you can also see the Bay Runway - at 14,511 feet, the second-longest commercial runway in North America, and a former backup landing strip for NASA's Space Shuttle. On a clear day the planes are essentially non-stop. The deck is, somehow, quiet.