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In 1993 the city offered to make the terminal a landmark, and almost nobody inside it wanted the offer. Two members of the public spoke in favour at the hearing. The airline that flew out of it and the Port Authority that owned it both said they were unsure, and TWA asked for the hearing to be put off. The designation went through in July 1994. Seven years later the airline was gone and the doors were locked.
What was being argued over: 236 pieces of glass in the front wall, cut on site as the building went up; an interior surfaced in what the press of 1962 counted as fifty-eight million ceramic tiles; an information desk carved from one slab of marble; and a split-flap board by Solari, which the landmarks report calls a Swiss watchmaker. Solari is Italian, from Udine.
One show got in during the eighteen years the place stood shut. An exhibition called Terminal 5 opened in October 2004 with work by Vanessa Beecroft, Jenny Holzer, Dan Graham, Ryoji Ikeda and Douglas Coupland, and was meant to run to January. The papers that week reported that the building was vandalised at the opening party and the Port Authority closed the show down. After that the only way in was a free tour once a year from Open House New York, and Allison Meier wrote in Hyperallergic in 2015 that the tours were what saved the building.
Catch Me If You Can came through in 2002, months after the last departure. Ocean's 8 came next: a New York daily reported that the terminal was rebuilt inside for a runway show with fifty looks made for it, Helena Bonham Carter's failing designer jeered off her own catwalk. Since the hotel opened in 2019 the crews have been smaller. Project Runway started a season here. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel sat Midge in the sunken lounge with a nervous flier and had Lenny Bruce cross her path in a red corridor on the way out. A photo agency caught Sutton Foster and Peter Hermann working on Younger one night in December. Those three rest on an episode recap, a travel magazine and the paparazzi; nobody who made them has said so on the record.
Between the opening in 1962 and the last TWA flight we found nothing filmed in here at all. The building was busy: aircraft on the ramp outside, passengers on the floor inside, no room for anyone with a camera until there was nobody left to be in the way.