The Ultimate Guide to the TWA Hotel at JFK: My Runway-View Room, Rooftop Pool, and Connie Cocktail Lounge Plane
- Mark Vogel
- Jul 20
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 4
4-Star Hotel in New York City ✈
I first spotted the TWA Hotel at JFK airport in New York City long before I reached the front desk. While gliding past on the AirTrain toward Terminal 5, I saw the terminal’s gull-wing roof perched beside the jetways, still as sleek as the morning it opened in 1962.
The building was designed by Eero Saarinen for Trans World Airlines at the height of the Jet Age, when air travel promised glamour instead of gate lice and rolling suitcases. Saarinen never lived to see his project finished—he died late in 1961—but the structure fulfilled his intent: it looked ready to leap off the ground even while its concrete ribs stood fixed to the tarmac.
A decade after TWA itself vanished, the headhouse slid into dormancy, its ticket counters shuttered and its red carpet rolled away. In 2016 the developers MCR & Morse began a meticulous restoration that would turn the landmark into a full-service hotel. They kept the swooping terminal as the public lobby and added two guest-room towers—the Saarinen Wing to the north and the Hughes Wing to the south—joined to the old flight tubes by glass bridges.
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“The combination of historical reverence and practical service carries the building’s legacy forward the way constant passenger flow once did.”
Stepping into one of those tubes on arrival felt as if I had time-traveled onto a Howard Hughes film set. The carpet is the exact red specified in TWA uniform manuals, and indirect lights run in clean rows along the curved ceiling. The faint scent of jet fuel drifted in from a nearby ramp connection, grounding the fantasy in present-day JFK. The tunnel ended in the headhouse, where space opens like a movie reveal. Sunlight pours through wall-high windows that wrap from floor to ceiling. A Solari flip-board clicks through destinations that no longer exist—Idlewild, Midway, Stapleton—yet the sound itself belongs to every era of air travel, and it anchors the lobby’s constant flow of guests toward check-in, the Paris Café, or the Sunken Lounge.
The Sunken Lounge sits in a shallow pit at the heart of the terminal, ringed by a low parapet that once served as a handy place to rest a cocktail tray. During my stay it served the same purpose, only the drinks leaned toward Palomas and espresso martinis rather than the original gimlets. Everything from the waist-high parapet to the curved banquettes has been restored using Saarinen’s drawings. Even the fabric patterns match those visible in Life Magazine spreads from the early sixties.
Clusters of white and red Tulip chairs appear throughout the Sunken Lounge and the quiet corners of the flight tubes, their single pedestal bases echoing the sweeping concrete piers above. Eero Saarinen designed the chair for Knoll in 1956, aiming to clear what he called the “slum of legs” created by four-legged furniture. Seeing his own seating in the terminal he also devised binds the building and its contents together, reminding guests that Saarinen’s talent extended beyond architecture into industrial design that still feels modern today.
Off to one side stands a bank of phone booths that now serve as selfie spots, and on the opposite side a period barbershop display holds real clippers and jarred combs soaked in blue barbicide. A few steps beyond, an entire room-sized Twister board fills an alcove. The spinner is mounted on the wall, and guests actually use it—usually after a martini or two.
In practical terms, the lobby doubles as a functioning check-in hall. Self-service kiosks sit where ticket agents once worked. Behind them, luggage lockers occupy the footprint of the old flight-insurance counters. The renovation team embedded modern HVAC and fire-suppression gear inside the concrete wings without visible ductwork, so the roofline reads exactly as Saarinen intended. Unlike many adaptive-reuse hotels, the technology never intrudes on the architecture; Wi-Fi routers hide behind custom baffles, and sprinklers pop out of nearly invisible trim rings.
I stayed in a Deluxe Runway-view Room in the Hughes Wing, the southern tower that rises directly above the flight tube closest to JetBlue’s Terminal 5 gates. That wing also supports the rooftop pool, so elevators run straight from the guest corridors to the pool deck. The corridor itself is a deep-red passage dotted with original womb-chair reproductions and globe sconces that cast a gentle cone of light onto the carpet. My room measured just shy of two hundred square feet—cozy by suburban standards, generous by New York ones. Most important, the window dominated the entire exterior wall, and it was constructed from seven layers of glass separated by vacuum chambers and acoustic films. I could see Delta and Air France wide-bodies taxiing fifty yards away, but when I slid the motorized blackout shade open I heard almost nothing beyond a low white-noise hiss. Any aviation-minded guest will spend at least half an hour letting planes roll by like an IMAX movie in silence.
Décor inside the room stops short of kitsch. A working rotary-style desk phone sits beside a 1965 issue of Life Magazine; the article on Concorde prototypes feels prophetic inside a terminal that predated supersonic commercial flight by nearly a decade. A scarlet metal safe hides inside the walnut wardrobe and easily fits a sixteen-inch laptop plus a camera bag. Instead of a clunky fold-down ironing board, the closet holds a handheld garment steamer—a thoughtful inclusion that I used on a wrinkled sport coat before dinner. The bathroom’s terrazzo tile pattern intentionally mirrors motifs Saarinen applied to the Gateway Arch visitor center in St. Louis, an Easter egg architecture fans will appreciate. A hairdryer and full-height mirror complete the space without crowding.
Dinner at the Paris Café is a popular spot. Jean-Georges Vongerichten consulted on the menu, and the open kitchen turns out familiar bistro fare—roast chicken, lobster thermidor, a precise steak frites—while still leaving room for travelers in a hurry to grab a croque-monsieur and make a flight. While waiting for some kosher food I ordered from Bravo Pizza in the Five Towns, I sat at a former TWA ticket counter repurposed as a marble-topped chef’s pass. From that perch I could look across the lobby at the Sunken Lounge and see guests descending the carpeted steps to order their next round.
Connie is the hotel’s crown jewel: a 1958 Lockheed L-1649A Starliner that served TWA’s long-haul routes before the 707 rendered piston propliners obsolete. After retirement and a short stint in Alaska, the airframe languished on an Arizona airfield until MCR bought it, trucked it across four states on a multi-day convoy, and restored it with original nav panels, sleeper-seat hardware, and murals commissioned by TWA design chief Mario Zamparelli.
Today the airplane sits on a dedicated concrete pad beside the headhouse. Guests board via a rolling stairway at the L-1 door, exactly as TWA passengers would have in 1960. I took a forward seat under the bulkhead map of transatlantic routes and ordered a rum & Coke served in etched glassware bearing the twin-globe logo. The bartender explained that every pour uses sixty-year-old service carts refurbished with modern refrigeration coils. Even the music fits the era: Davis, Brubeck, early Beatles.
The cabin lighting is soft enough to read a menu yet bright enough for the steward-uniformed servers to navigate safely. When I stepped back outside twenty minutes later, the airplane sat under floodlights strong enough to catch the TWA tail logo from the AirTrain passing overhead.
The rooftop pool requires a reservation for day guests but remains first-come for hotel patrons during early morning and late evening windows. At sixty-three feet long it qualifies as a lap pool, though most guests treat it as a plunge with a view. In summer the water hovers around seventy-eight degrees; in winter hotel engineers crank submerged heaters so the pool becomes a giant steam bath. I chose an evening swim to catch golden-hour light washing across rows of taxiway lights. From the water I could watch an Emirates A380 dwarf every other aircraft on the field. The bar behind the pool deck serves frozen pina coladas in plastic glasses molded into miniature TWA globes. A row of loungers under red umbrellas lines the parapet, and each lounger hides a lockable drawer sized for wallets and phones.
Fitness options extend inside. The hotel claims its 10,000-square-foot gym is the world’s largest hotel fitness center, and that is easy to believe. Equipment ranges from Peloton bikes to rowing machines and free weights; everything rests on spacers that mirror the angled legs of Saarinen furniture. A secondary stretch deck offers yoga mats, foam rollers, and resistance bands, and the music mix stays era-agnostic—think Stevie Wonder followed by Aria Grande—so regulars will not suffer retro overload.
Back in the lobby, retail options follow the same authenticity brief. The TWA Shop sells reproduction flight bags, Pan Am-style passport wallets, and even Boeing 707 safety cards printed on heavy cardstock. Near the shop stands a red-and-white gelato counter whose staff wear pillbox caps cloned from 1964 cabin-crew uniforms. Farther along the curve, baggage claim becomes a micro food hall: pick-up windows fill the niches once used for oversize-luggage belts.
Spending the night in a room that silent beside an active runway became the trip’s highlight. After thirty minutes of plane-spotting, I closed the motorized blackout shade and let the window vanish behind matte fabric. The mattress sits on a low platform that matches Saarinen’s Pedestal Series baseboards, and the bedding trades the standard hotel triple-sheet arrangement for a lightweight duvet printed with a subtle atomic-era motif. Sconces on either side of the headboard provide warm pools of light perfect for reading the Life Magazine left on the desk. I noted a piece on Jackie Kennedy’s wardrobe choices during a 1962 tour of India; the accompanying photos looked identical to those I had seen earlier on the lobby’s digital displays.
Morning check-out took less than three minutes thanks to mobile key integration. I dropped luggage in a self-service locker, then walked five minutes through the flight tube directly into Terminal 5 security. The hotel’s draw, however, remains more visceral than convenient. Very few properties let a guest swim in an infinity pool while a 747 lines up on the runway below, then drink a classic cocktail in a cabin that once crossed the Atlantic on radial-engine power. Fewer still do so while sheltering that guest inside the preserved form of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated public spaces. Saarinen designed buildings that dramatize the act of movement, from Dulles’s wing-shaped main terminal to the soaring Gateway Arch by the Mississippi River. At JFK, his work finally moves again—not through its own power, but through a new function that lets travelers experience the Jet Age with today’s comforts.
Leaving through the same red flight tube felt bittersweet. The terminal behaves like a sculpture that happens to have doors. Beneath that curved shell, every surface still whispers about optimism in aluminum and concrete. Yet the structure’s new role as a hotel secures its future; instead of a dusty landmark visited by architecture students, it hosts plane spotters, business travelers, and wedding parties. The combination of historical reverence and practical service carries the building’s legacy forward the way constant passenger flow once did. I boarded the AirTrain and watched the roof recede behind hangars and jet bridges until it slipped from view. Only then did I realize that I’d never heard a jet engine during my entire stay unless I opened a door or window. For an airport hotel, silence might be the most luxurious amenity of all.
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