Our hotel room at the TWA Hotel at JFK overlooked a runway, which meant we were only a few hundred yards from the many airplanes lined up for takeoff. It was strange to take this in without any of the usual pressures and indignities of postmodern travel: there were no other people in the room, nobody coughing, crying, or laughing, nobody checking their phone for the latest gate change, nobody fighting with an airline employee, nobody ordering airport food from a tablet, nobody settling in for the night on three lounge chairs under a coat. The collective nightmare of the terminal had been replaced by a serene chamber in which you could suspend all knowledge of the hordes and their corporate overlords, in which you could believe that the last fifty or so years hadn't happened, or in which you had somehow stepped into a different universe filled with order and tranquility. 'I could get used to this,' I said, thumbing through a LIFE magazine from 1963.
The furniture and design of the room added to this surreal effect. Stephen and I began taking notes: would it be feasible to cover at least 30 percent of the walls in our house with this vertical slotted wood? Paint seemed so predictable; wallpaper was even worse. The lamp reminded me of a similar model -- albeit a desk lamp -- my oldest brother had in his bedroom in the house where we grew up in the early 1970s, when I was a young kid and he was a teenager. I understood that I was in the grips of a nostalgic frenzy, but I didn't care: it felt good to be assuaged by these relics and reproductions from a past that felt remote but not unlived. I wanted it to last indefinitely.
Eventually, Stephen and I roused ourselves from our stupor and explored the former terminal. Every curve, every step, and every tile had -- as far as I could tell -- been perfectly restored. I had forgotten what it felt like to be awakened and stimulated by architecture. This building, it seemed, was the opposite of the surveillance/luxury nightmare that is Hudson Yards, for example, or even the Oculus, which though open to all still feels like a cathedral to capitalism. Here, although the main room was open, there were many pools of space -- in, around, and under the staircases and platforms -- that, in contrast to the terminals we have now, offered a sense of privacy and refuge. There was no barrage of advertising or purchasing opportunities.
The hallways were long and devoid of any branding, except for the TWA red, which, given that TWA is dead, added to the nostalgia. Imagine if, every time you went to a new place, you were able to walk through a passage like this, with thick padded carpet and blank walls. Imagine if you were able to walk through a hallway like this and board a plane. Why would you ever care about anything else? In retrospect, this sense of escape -- when combined with a relentless individualism or selfishness -- seems like more a problem than a solution.
The illusion of living in the past only began to break down when we went to a cocktail lounge that had been crafted into the interior of an old plane. Like everything at this hotel -- and every upscale hotel -- the drinks were expensive. It was a reminder that this experience -- by which I mean an immersion into a stimulating, optimistic architectural environment or museum set from the past -- was beyond the reach of most, which is an economic reality of the society we've built over the last fifty years.
The illusion was further shattered by an uncomfortable proximity to the people who can afford this kind of experience, by which I mean the British man sitting next to us who was mansplaining the benefits of a leader like Margaret Thatcher to his American female companion who had suggested her preference for Elizabeth Warren; or the group of investors who spoke of football scores and the best resorts in the Caribbean (with one criteria: to make their demanding wives happy).
Listening to these conversations, I had to wonder: were we also horrible, oblivious members of a privileged class of people? Granted, we were only staying one night, and it was a bit of splurge, but how do you draw a line in these times? My sense is that if it were actually drawn -- using any number of metrics -- a lot of us would be surprised to find ourselves on the wrong side of it. It was, I realized after we left the cramped bar, more comfortable to view people from a distance, to against immerse ourselves into a nostalgic haze, to imagine that, by virtue of being in this building, we were aligned in collective our desire to make society modern and equitable, accessible and hopeful.
The next morning, the hotel, which no longer serves as an actual terminal, looked a little sad from across the road. It was not very big, and the vintage cars in the parking lot made it look like a carnival after the lights are off and the tents have been taken down.
I reminded myself to remember the glowing passageways, a symbol of the possibility we all need of moving from somewhere old to somewhere new.