Holding Out For A Eero

Now that the decision has been made to preserve Eero Saarinen’s Terminal 5, the question is what to do with it:

The Port Authority is seeking an earthbound second life for what may be the nation’s most romantic evocation of flight: Eero Saarinen’s landmark Trans World Airlines terminal at Kennedy International Airport.

Although its swooping forms amount to a three-dimensional transcription of “Come Fly With Me,” the building’s days as a functioning terminal were numbered in 2001 with the collapse of T.W.A. Designed in the day of the Lockheed Constellation and strained almost to bursting by the Boeing 747 and its jumbo successors, the 44-year-old building now stands empty, idle and obsolete.

Restaurant? Lounge? Spa? Shopping mall? Conference center? Museum? Theater? Botanical garden? Sculpture court? Office space? A mixture? The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is open to these ideas and “anything else that can be imagined by a redeveloper,” said its aviation director, William R. DeCota.

(a “three-dimensional transcription of ‘Come Fly With Me'”? What in the 23 Skidoo is that hepcat David Dunlap talking about?)

Directly behind the landmark, JetBlue Airways is constructing a new Terminal 5, which is to open in 2008. The buildings will be connected through the dreamlike tubular corridors — featured evocatively in the 2002 film “Catch Me If You Can” — that once led to T.W.A.’s gates. Two electronic ticketing and check-in kiosks will be installed in the Saarinen building, so that passengers who choose to do so will still be able to go through its soaring spaces on the way to their planes.

But something besides two kiosks must fill the 60,000-square-foot main hall, which sits under the vaulted juncture of the four curving concrete lobes that give the building its birdlike silhouette. Something must fill the galleries that once housed the Ambassador Club, the Paris Cafe and the Lisbon Lounge.

One thing not to do — invite fucktard artists to party there.