NEW YORK — The 44-year-old Trans World Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport is evocative, iconic — and a white elephant.
Built in 1962, the TWA Flight Center was designed by Eero Saarinen, who also created St. Louis' Gateway Arch and Dulles Airport in Virginia. Its soaring, birdlike roof and curvy interior shapes evoke the excitement of the Jet Age, when travelers dressed up rather than stripped down to get on an airplane.
These days, it's way too small to be used as an airline terminal. It needs a lot of work, including asbestos removal. And because it's on the National Register of Historic Places, it can't be changed significantly.
It has sat empty for five years, since TWA went out of business in 2001. It is surrounded on three sides by construction: a $740 million, semicircular terminal being built by JetBlue, which will have twice the number of gates and nearly four times the square footage.
"As a piece of architecture, it's exciting, but as a functioning airport terminal, it just absolutely can't meet the needs of today," says William DeCota, director of aviation for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that runs the airport.
JetBlue passengers will enter the new terminal directly, from a road behind the TWA building, or through the old terminal, which has two tube-like elevated corridors that once led to gates but now will lead to the new building.
JetBlue plans to put two electronic ticket kiosks in the TWA building, but the airline won't say whether it will propose a new use for the building on its doorstep. Integrating the old terminal into the new has never been part of the plan, says Richard Smyth, JetBlue's vice president for redevelopment.
"It just didn't work functionally, as nice as it looks," he says.
Architecture buffs and historic preservationists adore the building and like the idea that someone might use it again, but they're divided on what that use should be. Last week, the Port Authority sent out a request to developers to find a new use for the building.
The Municipal Art Society of New York, a non-profit preservation group represented on an advisory panel for historic structures, wants the TWA terminal to be used as an airline terminal — a front door, so to speak, for the JetBlue building.
"Some buildings are simply better left in their original use, and we think this is one," says Frank Sanchis, senior vice president of the society. "It's probably the most astounding airline terminal ever designed."
Sanchis estimates the cost of restoring the terminal at $20 million. "How many people are going to want to take on that?" he asks. He says the Port Authority may have to shoulder the expense before anyone is interested in redeveloping the building.
The New York Landmark Conservancy, another member of the advisory board, says a new use is necessary, and the thriving real estate market in New York means someone will step up.
"We disagree that this could be a functional airline terminal," says Peg Breen, president. "We think that's just romantic and wrong."
Possibilities, according to Breen's group: a spa, a very upscale restaurant or a conference center for people who fly in for meetings.
The Port Authority's DeCota cites Union Station in Washington, D.C., which is a train station and a successful shopping mall, as a model of adaptive use. But Union Station is three blocks from the Capitol and a mile from the tourist-thronged Smithsonian museums. JFK is an hour-long, traffic-choked, $45 cab ride from Manhattan.
"Something's going to happen to the building," DeCota says. "It's going to have a life."
The Port Authority has experience with construction: It is building the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower on the site of the World Trade Center. And it has done historic preservation: It restored the 1939 Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia airport for use as a terminal and offices in 1980. Last year it moved the original Newark Airport building, the first airport terminal in the nation in 1935, to get it out of the way of a runway. Restored, it is an office building.
But the agency wants someone else to take on the 75,000-square-foot TWA terminal, even though that means it won't be reopened until well after the JetBlue terminal is finished by the end of 2008.
"It could have been a really beautiful example of integrating a historic airline terminal into a new one," Sanchis says. "And allowing for a really grand experience in New York airline travel, which is rapidly diminishing.
"This is a signature (building). You know where you are when you're in this one."
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