TECHNOLOGICAL FATALISM AND SPACE AGE OPTIMISM AKA I WENT TO THE TWA HOTEL AND IT WAS REALLY NICE

from August 15:

This morning I got up very early and got my bag together and went to JFK. It wasn’t so hot yet and I had kind of woken up at the right time in my REM cycle, so I felt awake and somehow professional, on my way to a plane.

I’ve been traveling a lot this summer. I’ve been saying it’s because I didn’t leave the city at all last summer, but mostly it’s just because I am lucky.

I was sitting at my gate when Delta announced that they needed volunteers to switch to a later flight because this one was overbooked. They asked for “flexible flyers,” which I was. Then they gave me $900 and switched my flight. I am not kidding.

It’s rare that one senses one’s own good fortune, because the brain is not so interested in that all the time. This, however, was a moment in which I tipped my cap to God, because of how fabulously on-the-nose this was. A flight attendant named Johnny had been helping me and, after giving me my digital debit card, asked me what I would do with my day. I said it almost before my mind had registered my intention: The TWA!¹

I had always thought sort of wistfully about visiting, on my way to Rockaway or out the window from the JFK AirTrain. The TWA Hotel is housed in what was once the Trans World Airlines Flight Center, designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962. It’s very Jet Age / mid-century modern and looks like… maybe the space on one’s journey to heaven if one is very chic? Peaceful, big, cool. After TWA went bankrupt and the building sat unused for years, it was eventually restored and reopened in 2019 as a hotel. It is red and lush and Zen and minimalist.

The space was conceptualized, too, in the 1950s/60s, which was when airlines were deregulated and the government set the prices for flights. This meant that airlines competed on look and feel and branding (take this Pan Am one or this American Airlines one). This, to my eyes, made everything look cool! This building felt clean before I entered it, which is always a good sign. It made me think of the Le Corbusier chapels—sacred in levity, though decidedly less grounded

TWA Hotel (from their website). 1962/2019.

.

Le Courbusier/Ronchamp Chapel/Notre Dame du Haut. 1955.

The ’60s playlist goes on loop endlessly, and I heard it wafting on my walk toward the entrance. I put on my sunglasses before walking in. Cat-eyes! Otherwise, I was feeling a little busted and inelegant in context. I was in a depressingly contemporary outfit with —almost worse— violent-looking cupping marks all over my back. Chic in a dark and holistic way in Brooklyn, really arbitrary and troubling in a tank top at the vintage hotel.

The TWA Hotel has many rules, which is sort of charming and also surreal and probably would have been annoying if I had not committed to a day of surprising whimsy. For example, there is a long row of people to check you in, but you can’t do the old-fashioned thing I was hoping to do, which is say: “I’d like a Day-Tripper room.” That’s the kind of room you can get for the day and not the night, which is kind of sexy and clever and glamorous. Instead, you have to reserve online, and that is a bit deflating.

First, I padded (on red carpet!) around the entire TWA space: little museum exhibits of flight attendant outfits and building history.

Then, rounding corners, more surprising stuff: little nooks and crannies that were lush and hushed and out of the way. Big patterns and cavernous couches, a sunken and womblike feel. The fact that mirrors were everywhere, in a space mostly conceptualized pre-iPhone, made me feel a strange affection toward the narcissism of the human experience.

My Day-Tripper room was totally nice, and I read while I watched the restaurant happen across from my room and planes took off out of my periphery. Then ‘the Alones’ kind of kicked in—that feeling when you’re not quite sure what you need. This made me recall that I had only slept five hours the night before and that I was very tired. But then I realized I was too hungry to sleep, so I popped downstairs to the food hall.

For food context: there’s a Jean-Georges restaurant I did not go to. There’s a Mr. Softee stand that charmed me. I ended up eating a randomly amazing buckwheat crepe with mushroom, feta, and spinach. Go figure!

I had rented my room for the minimum amount of time, so off I went. Up to the pool, where I was able to kind of charm the pool boy (pool… man?) into letting me hang out there for $10 as opposed to $25 (both, of course, insane if you think about it). He asked to take my bags, except for the essentials I would need beside me, because we were in an Open Fly Zone. This expression was compelling and I asked him more about it. It meant that there would be planes taking off in front of us and beside us.

This was the special part. The sun was a little much, but the gentle breeze of a plane in flight so close to me gave this feeling of planes being animals of their own ecosystem. Piloted glamorously, or —and not in a scary way— not at all. Taking off on account of their own volition, calmly ascending. Every few minutes, the pool would ripple and someone’s hat would blow around and someone’s drink would scuttle along the outside tile and all the kids would be held at the edge of the infinity pool by their parents, everyone would go sort of quiet, pointing and looking up.

I kept having this feeling I couldn’t place, until I realized that it was —eerily— optimism. Not just optimism for no reason (which is sort of a dogma of mine), but optimism due to technology. This space felt inventive and interesting, and I was curious about it and kind of marveling. I was looking around, feeling excited and anticipatory, surrounded by the Space Age vision of the future from the literal past.

There is something about celebrating the marvel of American innovation in a way that feels sort of heartbreaking. I spend so much time dreading the AI future and preemptively mourning expectations that I didn’t know I had of what the world would look like for my lifetime. The TWA space is crazy because it made me remark at the newness it seems to celebrate —and makes me wistful or confused about, I guess, how we got here. That optimistic, aspirational feeling around technology now feels naïve and an invaluable luxury.

But whatever! Actually, the whole thing made me think a lot about Mars 2112, where, as a child, I would find great joy.

After the pool, I went to the lobby bar to force myself to write. Because the tax of a lucky day is to do something not only productive, but something one has avoided based on the evasive logic of monotonous quotidian inconvenience.

I got a Jet Fuel spritzer, which tasted truly just like watermelon water. A level below me, in the sunken living room of the Airplane Hangar Hotel, a server in a pilot shirt asked someone, concerning their Caesar salad and white wine, “Was it good?”
To my ears, a totally direct question and sort of wrong in its crudeness. I thought about how servers of yesteryear, hearing that, would have balked. Was it good? But she meant it, and nodded on beat when they said yes! There were two giant old boards of departures and arrivals, each of which exploded in furious ticking sounds once every 10 or so minutes. Each letter changed, generating notes and numbered codes of airlines that no longer exist and places I am not used to people going: Fargo, Osaka, Duluth.

1962, the year that this original hangar was built, was the height of the Space Age; John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. The Century 21 World’s Fair showcased the Space Needle. The Atomic Age! The Jetsons!
Why —then— would the futurist aesthetic of these spaces bring me such quiet pleasure? Other than the nice clean lines and red and padded openness?

I think about this as I sit and wait, watching the panels say the names of places that I have never been and probably will never go. I think about how Pope John Paul II flew TWA on his papal visits, and the aircraft was called “Shepherd I.” Bishop Fulton J Sheen said that TWA meant: “Travel With Angels”. I think, or try to, of a major point to make.

Pope John Paul II, Baltimore to Rome, 1995.

Mostly it is this:

If you really ever want to impress someone special? Take them here on a date.

1. Note: this is a totally unsponsored post. But if you want to sponsor a post, we can have that conversation :)