Besides being the month of Thanksgiving, November is the month of the Dead Kennedy. It’s a time of remembering a day of blood and brains on a pink dress in Dallas, a portal into a black hole in the last half-century’s history.

For those of us born in and after the 1960s, who can’t literally recall the day of the assassination, the real figure from November 1963 haunting our childhood imaginations was a boy, our age, standing in short pants and saluting his father’s coffin.

John Kennedy Jr., who would have turned 52 this week, was our Kennedy. The beautiful man known as John John, who grew up cavorting on the Cape and Skorpios with Jackie O, discoing in New York with Mick and Bianca and Andy, was a symbol of sex and privilege, his elitism so gracefully carried. 

I met him on a few occasions when I wrote for his magazine George. His pet project was idealistic, and a bit ahead of its time. The magazine was first of all an extension of the Kennedy brand: substance, celebrity and just enough whimsy to appeal to those who had flipped the channel from the nightly news to MTV.

In person he was an easygoing thoroughbred, perfectly mannered, all varnished normalcy. Sitting beside him at lunch in a Washington bistro, you knew that he knew exactly which fork to use first, but he wasn’t going to make you feel bad for not unfolding the napkin properly, either.

Turning up at New York parties in the 1990s, he and his blond wife were luminous creatures, towering over everybody else, tall, sylphic and fair. Olympians.

In the 13 years since he died, I remember Kennedy whenever I exit the Franklin Street subway station by Bubby’s, the corner restaurant where the paps so often staked him out, across from the Tribeca loft he shared with his lovely, restless and unhappy bride until the day they died.

This month, though, I found myself thinking about him while driving west from the city at Thanksgiving, beneath the contrails of small jets and planes crisscrossing sky over Essex County Airport, the location from which he took off on a summer day in 1999.

Before the 2000 election and 9/11, that plane crash in the fog over the Cape was one of the tragic millennial plot twists. I’m not saying Kennedy would have been president or changed the course of history. But he was our generation’s Kennedy, possessed of that rare quality from another era called charm, who might have helped recharge the progressive politics that were his birthright. Maybe, just maybe, he would have shown the brutes in Washington how to be civil in an uncivilized age.

Our Kennedy was, like the rest of us, a self-indulgent underachiever, a little lost. He loved his Frisbee, and he flunked the bar exam a couple times. But his greatest underachievement was his untimely death. What he might have been—perhaps a senator or governor—we will never know.

JFK JR.’S DAD ENDURED A SECOND, reputational death with revelations about CIA plots and his seedy private life, the revolving door of women in and out of the White House, feeding the now-named sex addiction. The younger Kennedy didn’t want to see that. I wrote a book about one of the mistresses and I never wrote for his magazine or saw him again.

He protected his dad’s legend, surely, but the rest of us came to expect, if not to revel in, the failures of his storied clan, from the peccadilloes of Bobby and Teddy, to the lost souls of the next generation, the heroin addictions, the rape charges, the car crashes, and most recently, the divorce ending in suicide of Bobby Junior’s wife in Katonah.

As children of the 1960s, we grew up knowing better than to put our faith in great men and higher institutions—starting with Nixon's resignation, the Church committee naming the dirty deeds done in service of our free enterprise around the world, the coups and assassinations, drug experiments, the dirty wars.

Born at the end of the Baby Boom, we were cowed into learned helplessness by black ops and nuclear Armageddon and by easy drugs and cheap gas, too young to protest, too high to care. We partied because tomorrow might never come, pretty sure we were the final generation before nuclear Armageddon. We had no clue that a different sort of Armageddon was underway, slow, painless and invisible, until the streets of Detroit turned into apocalyptic movie sets and our ponds stopped freezing in winter.

In their book, That Used to Be Us, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum lay out the statistical decline that’s occurred on our generation’s watch.

Thirty years ago, 10 percent of California’s general revenue fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons. Today nearly 11 percent goes to prisons and 8 percent to higher education.

The shameless abandonment of all communitarian impulse that lay behind the Reagan era wealth shift happened on our watch: the top 1 percent now holds 40 percent of the wealth. Twenty-five years ago, the top 12 percent held 33 percent of the wealth.

The truest measure of our generation’s decline is in the kids of a gutted middle class. The descendants of Greatest Generation are fat, diabetic, meth-addicted sloths who couldn’t make it through basic training if they were so inclined. “Seventy-five percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24,” Messrs. Friedman and Mandelbaum wrote, “are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record or are physically unfit.”

The authors blame outside forces: globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation’s chronic deficits and its pattern of energy consumption.

But we know better. We know that the decline started inside of us. Like Kennedy—our best and brightest—our own squandered potential comes from the don’t-give-a-shit decades of our extended youth, from the classes we cut in college to smoke dope and play Ultimate, from the planet we heated with the fumes from so many cross country road trips, and from the island of plastic in the Pacific we would make with our limitless intake of bottled water and supersized soda.

Frank DiGiacomo, in a July 1999 obit for John Jr. he wrote in these pages, tried to describe what Junior’s death meant for his peers. Mr. DiGiacomo didn’t know that it was one dispiriting tragedy preceding so much worse—the imminent disastrous election of 2000 and the falling of the World Trade towers.

But he sensed something dark coming, as we all did.

“We’re all older now,” Mr. DiGiacomo wrote. “And somehow, New York’s 21st century seems a little colder and more distant knowing that John Kennedy—who was supposed to be in our future, who may be irreplaceable in our lives—is contained forever, back here with our youth, in his father’s century, the 20th.”

John John died just as he was getting his act together at age 38—belatedly, like the rest of us, getting less diffident, gaining hope, finding a purpose. He would have been gray around the temples by now and, who knows, maybe living up to his birthright and promise as another desperately needed, persuasive voice for progressive ideals in Albany or D.C.

We, his peers, forge into middle age and these troubled times that none of us foresaw or, it must be admitted, would or could have tried to prevent.

RIP this week then to our misspent youth, and to the very symbol of its lost promise, the boy saluting death, forever.

editorial@observer.com

(Photo: Wikimedia)

When Hurricane Sandy overwhelmed New York City, the airport infrastructure naturally shut down along with everything else. As with the subway and bridge systems, however, it seems airplane travel is returning to normalcy.

Earlier today, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced the reopening of two airports in the metropolitan area, John F. Kennedy and Newark Liberty, to limited traffic, with the fate of LaGuardia Airport remaining uncertain as officials sought to repair and inspect the facility in the wake of flood damage. But that ambiguity did not last long; Governor Andrew Cuomo just declared LaGuardia will open too.

"Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced this afternoon the reopening of LaGuardia Airport tomorrow morning, November 1, at 7:00 AM," a press release proclaimed. "Both runways will be open."

Additionally, on the Port Authority's website, the agency said there will be "limited flight schedules" and advised, "Please contact your airline before traveling to the airport to determine the status of your flight."

As The Observer and others have been lamenting for some time now, the day has passed for Jet Age JFK. Terminal 3 is being demolished to make way for more airplane parking to accommodate Delta's expansion of Terminal 4. And now we learn that the same fate has befallen the Sundrome, which was unceremoniously destroyed last year, with no immediate plans for replacement. This leaves only the still-shuttered Terminal 5 as the last remnant of midcentury JFK.

And yet while a piece of architectural history may be gone, it could mean smoother flying for those in and out of JFK, which is really what the airport is all about.

Yesterday, the Port Authority approved JetBlue's plans for what it is calling T5i, an expansion of its three-year-old Terminal 5 to accommodate the carrier's growing international flights (plus a Steve Jobs riff). The project will cost $200 million, create $325 million in economic activity, and add six new gates, freeing up space at Terminal 4 where JetBlue currently operates its international flights from.

“By 2030, more than 160 million people will fly through our airports annually,” Port Authority deputy executive director Bill Baroni said at yesterday's board meeting, when the expansion was approved. “They deserve the best customer experience in the best terminals."

And that is the challenge of airport preservation. Those six new gates will not occupy the space that was vacated by I.M. Pei's Terminal 6. Instead, five new hard stands will be built, the aviation term for parking spots. This is the same fate that befell Terminal 3—it became seven parking spots.

This may seem like an ignominious fate for some remarkable, groundbreaking buildings. Terminal 6 contained the first free-standing glass wall even built, which is to say not supported by a steel structure, just the glass. It was an architectural marvel, forever lost, and now we learn not even to be replaced by another building.

But this is an airport. It is hard enough turning an old factory into a museum, or converting an office tower into apartments, harder still to make that 80-year-old office building feel brand new. At our airports, functional reuse is almost impossible. The planes are too big, as is the security apparatus, and even the functioning of the industry.

Part of the reason JFK needs all that terminal-side parking is because the lean, mean airlines struggling to survive today fly so many more flights, turn so many more planes, than they used to. No more sitting at the gate, or in a hanger—the babies have to move, move, move. And for that, they need room.

"There's a need for parking, certainly," Port Authority spokesman Ron Marisco said.

And so, JFK now has six terminals instead of eight, and never, almost certainly never, will again.

Art, not commerce. (Alice Aycock)

Readers know The Observer is quite fond of Jet Age JFK, broken down as it is. The old terminals are almost gone now, as Delta broke ground on its expansion of Terminal 4 two weeks ago, meaning Terminal 3 will surely be torn down. But even newer pieces of the airport are not secure. The Times reports that the operators of Terminal 1 want to demolish and artwork there—to make room for more concessions. But Alice Aycock, the creator of the Star Sifter, is angrier than a TSA screener about it all.

The lawsuit said that Ms. Aycock found out about the plan to remove “Star Sifter” when the terminal’s management unit, the Terminal 1 Group Association, wrote to her last December. The same unit had commissioned her to design the sculpture in time for Terminal 1’s opening in mid-1998 as the first new passenger building at J.F.K. in more than 25 years.

“The sculpture had a dual purpose,” the lawsuit said. “Not only was the sculpture intended to enrich the terminal aesthetically, but it was also intended to fulfill a functional purpose by filling an opening in the rotunda that created an unanticipated security risk in the building design.”

The lawsuit quoted from a letter the management unit had sent her in 1997 that said “the main objective is to create a screen” separating the mezzanine from the departure area beyond the security checkpoint. The lawsuit quoted an article in Woman’s Art Journal that said the idea behind the opening had been to allow people on the mezzanine to “look down upon passengers making their way through the security checkpoint directly below.”

Apparently another Au Bon Pain would do just as good a job of keeping the security of the terminal intact.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

In particular, they wanted to know what he thought of Sean’s decision to become a Muslim. Oliver instructed his office to decline comment.

Sean Christopher Ali Stone at a press conference in Tehran, Iran, on Feb. 17 (ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images)

“He never consulted me,” the elder Mr. Stone recalled in a phone call to The Observer from his production office in Los Angeles. “That is something you normally talk to your parents about.”

The director is a practicing Buddhist. “Obviously the Muslim religion believes in a singular god,” he added. “I don’t.”

Sean Stone, a 27-year-old filmmaker who was raised a Buddhist and spent his youth exploring his Christian and Jewish roots (not to mention any number of film sets), is like his old man, a determined—some would say obstinate—truth-seeker. He is also a man of firm opinions who is unafraid to express them in a highly public fashion.

But to peg him, as one Yahoo! News commenter did recently, as “another nut from a spoiled confused family,” is to miss the point entirely.

To hear him tell it, accepting Islam as his faith (and adopting a new Muslim middle name, Ali) is a demonstration that one man can embrace three Abrahamic religions as a gesture of peace.

“I don’t take a priest’s interpretation as sanctity,” he said. “I would not take an imam’s ruling on the Koran as being definitive. I would not take anyone’s word except my own interpretation of the books.”

Mr. Stone’s conversion was only part of his recent media coming-out party. In announcing his newfound faith, he eagerly stepped into perhaps the thorniest foreign policy question of the moment: whether Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons, and whether its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a total nutjob.

“My main thing is I don’t want to see a war, an imperialistic war, because I know what it could do to the region,” he said.
Mr. Stone also defended Mr. Ahmadinejad—the man who infamously referred to the Holocaust as a “myth” and declared that Israel should be “wiped off a map”—as a “rational actor.”

“The media is so biased in trying to paint him as a madman, because if he is a madman, you can’t talk to him,” he explained to The Observer.

Mr. Stone first met with Mr. Ahmadinejad in February, when he was a featured guest at the “Hollywoodism and Cinema” conference in Tehran. The president gave him a copy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.

When asked what they talked about, Mr. Stone didn’t really remember. The meeting might have seemed an opportunity to do some diplomatic work for his father, who had been eager to follow up his documentary portraits of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez with one on Mr. Ahmadinejad, but had been rebuffed (many Iranians took issue with perceived historical inaccuracies in his Alexander the Great biopic).  Still, the younger Stone didn’t push the issue.

It soon became clear that Mr. Stone’s views on Iran are not all that radical.  For instance, shortly after he defended his opinions to network news blowhards Bill O’Reilly and Piers Morgan, Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, appeared on 60 Minutes to declare that bombing Iran right now was “the stupidest idea [he] ever heard.”

Still, his comments were controversial, even within his own family. “When you’re younger, you can make mistakes by saying what people don’t want to hear,” the elder Mr. Stone noted. “Sometimes he says stuff that I think is downright fucking stupid.”

Mr. Stone posing on top of the Milad Tower in Tehran (MEHDI HASANI/AFP/Getty Images)

The Observer met the Son of Oliver at a rear table at Think Coffee by Union Square one March morning.

Tall, strapping and square-jawed, Sean Christopher Ali Stone appeared more Winklevii than Wahabi. He did not have his father’s self-described “Mongol eyes” or the gap between his teeth.

What he did have, however, was the family curiosity, and that knack for taking controversial positions.

“I think it’s important to have that spirit of inquiry, that spirit of investigation,” Mr. Stone said as he periodically sipped from a cup of chai tea. “If you keep slandering people, calling them ‘conspiracy theorists,’ you’re killing the desire to investigate, the desire to actually know.”

Mr. Stone, who is single and divides his time between Los Angeles and New York’s Alphabet City, wanted to make it clear that his highly publicized spiritual transformation was not intended as a publicity gambit.

It all began on Valentine’s Day 2010, when he and his filmmaking partner, Alexander Wraith, were at Letchworth Village, an abandoned institution for the mentally and physically disabled in Rockland County. They were there to film Graystone, Mr. Stone’s feature debut, about two men (named Sean and Alexander) who visit supposedly haunted sites to explore their belief in the supernatural.

He and Mr. Wraith had brought along candles from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which they lit and placed on the ground as they prayed aloud. They heard screams and howls and a child’s laughter, which scared them both shitless.

“That’s why there’s an expression ‘There are no atheists in foxholes,’” he said. “Either you find your faith and you believe that there is a higher power guiding you and protecting you, or else you basically surrender it and say there is no God.”

Two years later to the day, Mr. Stone found himself in Isfahan, Iran, sitting inside a mosque across from a Shiite cleric, explaining his reasons for wanting to be a Muslim. He was accompanied by a man named Bahram Heidari, an Iranian living in Canada who was helping him develop a feature film about the Sufi poet Rumi (Mr. Stone is also prepping a documentary on djinn, or genies). With an Iranian TV news crew on hand to document the occasion, Mr. Stone said the shahada, the Muslim declaration of belief.

“I didn’t ‘convert,’” he pointed out, “because I don’t believe you can convert from the same God. It’s an acceptance of Islam as an extension of what I call the Judeo-Christian tradition going back to Abraham.”

He said he was surprised the event generated so much attention. “We had not arranged for any press,” he said. “We don’t know how they found out about it.”

But when everyone from CNN to Agence France-Presse jumped on the story, he went with it. He later defended Iran on cable news. “It seems that every time we sanction this country and turn the bolts tighter around it … it’s just going to make them potentially more radical and dangerous,” he said. “You can’t just bomb your way to an accord.” While defending Mr. Ahmadinejad, he also was emphatic that “there is no room for Holocaust denial.” (Not long ago, his father also was quoted minimizing the Holocaust.)

It’s not hard to understand how Mr. Stone developed a certain sympathy for men of strong convictions who are unafraid to offend.

“He says things that rile people, I’m not going to deny that,” Mr. Stone said of Mr. Ahmadinejad. He says the same about his dad.
“I think he likes controversy,” Mr. Stone said. “I think as much as anything, he likes that people get riled.”Sean Stone was born in Santa Monica in 1984, the eldest child of Oliver and Elizabeth Burkit Fox, a production assistant and Oliver’s second wife.

Sean and Oliver on the set of "Heaven and Earth" (photo courtesy of Sean Stone)

He made his screen debut at 6 months, with a cameo in Salvador. At age 2, he was playing Gordon Gekko’s kid, “a fat little capitalist son,” as he put it.

His earliest and clearest film memory was being on the set of Born on the Fourth of July, in which he was among a group of kids shooting at each other with fake guns in the woods.

“That’s pretty intense when you’re, like, 4,” he said.

Mr. Stone’s early film career was more a matter of convenience than raw talent. “He was available and I thought he was photogenic,” his dad admitted.

Sean’s parents separated in 1993 (“It was not an easy divorce,” Oliver said), and Sean and his brother Michael lived with Elizabeth. When he could, Oliver took Sean on weekend trips “where he could be outside the normal Los Angeles ‘shop, drive, and die’ routine,” said Oliver.

They also traveled the world, from East Africa to Tibet, where Oliver, an Episcopalian who had converted to Buddhism, introduced the then 9-year-old Sean to the Dalai Lama.

“It’s a different kind of Buddhism, it’s an atomistic form,” Oliver said. “It must have been amazing for him.”
The experience was eye-opening, Sean said. It inspired him to take up the practice of meditation and fostered a curiosity about all forms of spirituality.
It was also around that time that Sean began to discover his father’s films, each one violent and provocative and dubious about the powers that be.

Mr. Stone was 7 when his father released JFK, a film that brought a mix of reviews both approving and vitriolic. The knocks on his father bothered him at the time, and still do.
“Of course it hurts,” he said. “To me it’s a disgrace that so many people get away with calling him a conspiracy theorist, when the truth is he’s always based his work on evidence. He does his homework.”

After graduating from Brentwood School, just around the same time the second Iraq war was getting underway, Mr. Stone considered joining the Army, “more out of a desire to have a life experience,” he said. (Oliver, who dropped out of Yale and eventually enlisted in the Army in 1967, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, recognized the impulse.) Rather than enlist, Mr. Stone wound up at Princeton, where he enrolled in the ROTC, bailing after a semester to focus on academics.

In 2009, after apprenticing with his father, Sean began to focus on his own filmmaking, starting with Graystone, which will be released on video-on-demand in the fall.

Mr. Stone’s long-term goal is to be a filmmaker, though his father is quick to tamp down expectations. “It’s very hard to assume the mantle, so to speak,” Oliver said. “It’s true about anybody in any profession, whether you’re the stockbroker’s son or a garbage man’s son.”

Mr. Stone agrees that it will be hard to step out from his father’s shadow and make a name for himself, though that new middle name of his is certainly a start.

Even so, his embrace of Islam goes only so far. For instance, Mr. Stone isn’t quite ready to forswear alcohol altogether.

“I know plenty of Christians and Jews who violate the Testaments all the time,” he pointed out. “It all depends on how you practice.”

drosen@observer.com

But what if instead of building a park, a subway or light rail line ran along the Far West Side?

It is not a ludicrous idea. Light rail has proven a boon in downtown Portland and elsewhere, and with the extension of the 7 train to Hudson Yards, the line could well have hooked up with the High Line and made a whole swath of under-developed Manhattan real estate more accessible.

A glittery park has achieved just as much, but this exact same debate is taking place in Queens, according to the Daily News. An old LIRR trestle that closed in the 1960s has been dubbed QueensWay by a group of park advocates hoping to turn the 3.5-mile stretch (three-times as long as the High Line) into a park.

The line stretches from Rego Park to the Rockaways, and it turns out those two communities are now at odds as those further from the city center lobby for the tracks reactivation instead of a park.

“Certainly a quick trip to JFK Airport from the core of the city is something people have talked about from Year One,” said George Haikalis, a civil engineer who heads the Institute for Rational Mobility, a nonprofit umbrella group for transit advocates. “Nobody in the rest of the world would be so dumb as to let a valuable asset like that sit there.”

[snip]

(Facebook)

We thought we'd closed the book on Jack the Cat when the feline, lost during a mishap in American Airlines baggage handling, was found after two months and rushed to a vet. The story seemed set for a Disney ending. But sadly, malnutrition and dehydration wore Jack down, and he has died despite intensive care. "Jack has gone over the rainbow bridge," writes the administrator of the Facebook group that publicized news about the lost cat.

Outpourings of sympathy on the Facebook page that galvanized a movement of FoJs (Friends of Jack) 24,000-strong; more than 2,700 weighed in to express their sympathy with Jack's owner or rage at American Airlines.

American Airlines also made a social media update.

Unfortunately, Jack the cat had to be euthanized by the veterinarian today. We are deeply saddened that Jack the cat has passed away, and we offer profound sympathy to Jack’s owner, Karen Pascoe, for her loss. Our heart also goes out to the Friends of Jack and those in the cat-loving community who have grown fond of Jack since he went missing. We understand that a cat is a beloved family member for so many, including our own employees.

From all of us at American, our sincere apologies to Karen and Jack’s family and friends. We also thank all of you who have provided support, ideas, kindness and understanding for Jack along the way.

We realized people were coming in via the JetBlue terminal and the street, there were almost too many to count. There were so many TWA vets there—and pilots and attendants from other airlines, past and present.  It was one of those simply "wow"—and for me—recalled high school and college times. I remember the days when each terminal was more beautiful than the other.  I would literally choose to fly TWA over United just so I could go thru those tubes—even if I had to go standby.  The vacation really started once you walked thru those tubes.

Wonder if anyone says that about the new Terminal 5? And if you don't know what our correspondent mean by the tubes, take the slideshow tour to find out. After the soaring roof, they may be the most famous piece of architect Eero Saarinen's masterpiece.

It was mentioned at the event by one Port Authority attendee that the old terminal could be open within the year, and a Port spokesperson told The Observer there was a possibility of that, though "end of year might be optimistic." And even then, the terminal would likely only be open on a limited basis, not daily. Some spaces, like the Constellation Club, are still being finished.

As for the plans for a new hotel tucked in behind the terminal, those are still waiting for take off. "Boutique hotel idea for TWA Terminal is still in works, but taking longer than originally envisioned," the spokesperson said.

All photos by Nicolas Lemery Nantel/salokin.com

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen.

A great deal of attention has been paid lately to vintage JFK. Thanks to that lovely show Pan Am, we got a glimpse of what Terminal 3 looked like in its glory days, rather than the leaking mess it had become in recent years. It was recently torn down so Delta, which is expanding Terminal 4, could have more space to park planes—no, not a new terminal, just a bare strip of tarmac, a glorified plane parking lot. (Maybe with the airport so congested, that's for the best. Another terminal would mean more planes everyday, wouldn't it?)

Then there is the still stately Terminal 6, JetBlue's home before it took over the new Terminal 5 encircling Eero Saarinen's revered TWA Terminal. Terminal 6 is also coming down, a soaring glass pane and concrete strut at a time. There has been much handwringing over this of late, thanks in no small part to the appearance of Christina Ricci in a blue stewardess' garb, but as is often the case with old buildings, it is too little, too late. And we don't even yet know what is replacing the thing.

That leaves us with the TWA Terminal and the TWA Terminal alone.For those feeling the twinge of nostalgia a little too strongly  right now (present company included), Open House New York has delivered a respite. This Sunday, October 16, Saarinen's swan-like masterpiece will be open to the public from 1:00 to 4:00. Unlike so many Open House events, there are no reservations, so the space is unlimited. Bring the kids, bring a date!

Can't wait? Take a tour with The Observer right now >>

Charles Kramer, an architect at Beyer Blinder Belle who oversaw the renovation of the terminal last decades, and James Steven, manager of JFK facilities at the Port Authority, will lead a talk starting at 1:00.They will be discussing the renovation and efforts to rehabilitate the space with commerce—as well as fielding angry questions about Terminal 6, The Observer imagines.

Those latter two have a lot in common. When people point to the destruction of Terminals 3 and 6 as a loss of historic airline architecture, the Port points to Terminal 5 as plenty. Not only is it the most iconic of the terminals, but the authority has had a hell of a time redeveloping the thing.

It's given up on getting Jet Blue to use it as a fancy check-in area, which, let's face it, even the biggest architecture buff would probably bypass in the interest of getting to the gate five minutes faster. The latest plan is to turn Terminal 5 into a luxury hotel of some sort, maybe run by Andre Balazs, Donald Trump, or some other boldface developer. It might well be the coolest Ramada Inn ever built, but considering there have been no developments in the plan for almost a year, one wonders if it is not dead, especially with innovative Port Authority director Chris Ward headed for the exits.

And so we are left with our world-renowned folly. If you'd like to get a look inside this weekend, check ohny.org for details.

Well, it looks like we could not have been more wrong, as The Journal revealed yesterday that Andre Balazs--already said to be making a play for the Chelsea--toured the site, wedged between Saarinen's original Terminal 5 and JetBlue's crestent-shaped new one.

SLIDESHOW: Welcome to the Hotel Eero Saarinen? >>

And today comes the news that none other that Donald Trump, or at least his representatives, looked into the project, as did European pod-hoteliers Yotel and Starwood, owners of the Sheraton and W brands.

The Journal is quick to point out that it's by no means certain any of these companies will be involved, but it is still good news for the Port, which is desperate to see something take hold on the site. And there is still the matter of receiving a litany of approvals, including from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the FAA.

The Observer remains reluctant to make a reservation, awesome as such an inn would be, but with hotels willing to try anything to recover from the recession, this sems like a good place to start.

SLIDESHOW: Welcome to the Hotel Eero Saarinen? >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo