Saarinen's TWA Terminal: Airport Of An Innocent Age

The author recalls a tour of the TWA Flight Center on Sept. 10, the day before his tour guide, Neil D. Levin, executive director of the Port of New York and New Jersey, attended a breakfast meeting at the Windows on the World in the World Trade Center. Saarinen's "soaring monument to the optimism and glamour of the early jet age" is a product of "a more innocent age" that we still lived in just a few days ago. " The Saarinen T.W.A. terminal, which opened in 1962 at what was then Idlewild Airport, is a soaring monument to the optimism and glamour of the early jet age. Saarinen was the architect who had captured the openness of America's promise in his design for the arch in St. Louis, gateway to the West. Here he designed an equally inspired and open gateway to the world, and gateway to New York, for one of America's two flagship airlines."

Thanks to Sally Greene