Interview: Tyler Morse, CEO Morse Hotels - TWA Hotel
Location: The TWA Lounge - 86th Floor, One World Trade Center

In 2018, Gailen David chatted with Tyler Morse, Managing Partner of MCR Development, about the opening of The TWA Hotel at New York JFK Airport.

Gailen David: Hi Tyler! The TWA Hotel is opening when?

Tyler Morse: One year from now, in the spring of 2019.

Gailen David: And what we're sitting in is really a mock-op or replica of what the lobby, the style, the design, of the lobby that's going to be the TWA Hotel.

Tyler Morse: Yep. Well, you're sitting here in a replica of Eero Saarinen's iconic sunken lounge, which is out in the TWA building, and we wanted to make a connection between Saarinen's masterpiece and New York City. Luckily, the preservationist community saved the building from destruction, so we are all better off because of that. And then we won the opportunity to bring the building back to life.

Gailen David: Well, what was different about your concept of how to do a hotel that made it actually happen?

Tyler Morse: So I think our love for aviation and our intersection with being in the hotel business really brought this project to life. We did an adaptive reuse project called the Highline Hotel a couple of years ago and love the process and the creative behind it, and I think applying it, at a larger scale, to TWA was exciting and I think the port authority recognized our excitement about the project and our ability to get it done.

Gailen David: There was just a sound of the flipping sign. I know you've got these elements, these things that people love about that terminal, not only the swooping shape of it, but you've preserved some of the things like we're sitting on a bench.

Tyler Morse: Chili pepper red.

Gailen David: Chili pepper red. I mean, you're sticking to all the details, the tiling.

Tyler Morse: Saarinen's iconic penny tiles. This is a Solari split-flap board. It's only manufactured by one firm in the world now, Solari Udine, based out of Northern Italy.

Gailen David: One of the things that I'm so excited about, is that you're coming in and you're doing a high end hotel, people definitely can spend money and stay there, but you're also thinking about people that are passing through and that just want to experience what flight was like back in the sixties. And you're making it available for visitors just to come and experience that.

Tyler Morse: Yeah. I mean, flying in 1962 was a very special experience. It was reserved for a small subset of the population and you had to put a tie on and you dressed up for your flight and the whole experience was a big deal. And we've really seen the democratization of air travel over the past 50 years, but we're hearkening back to a day when flying was a very special experience and we're even going so far as to, we have a 1956 Lockheed Constellation as part of the project, that is going to be a restaurant and bar and the plane is going to be parked right in front of the building in between the iconic swooping tubes.

Gailen David: See this is, for someone that's an aviation geek, to some extent, this kind of stuff is just overwhelming, because you're thinking about all those details that I think is going to amaze people. You're going further than what they would have expected for someone to do.

Tyler Morse: It's the little details that really bring the ethos of 1962 back to life.