New York's TWA Hotel is a stylish work in progress

The retro-chic TWA Hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport wants you to think of the Brat Pack, the Beatles and the soaring grace of Eero Saarinen's futuristic terminal, dedicated to the then-new jet age.

What the hotel doesn't want is for guests to hear even a murmur of jet-engine noise from adjacent taxiways. To achieve this solitude, the hotel sheathed both wings of the new 512-room hotel with a 4.5-inch glass curtain wall, second-thickest in the world, to hush JFK's madding bustle.

Draw shut the blackout shades in every room, and you're in a virtually silent chamber save for the low whoosh of air conditioning. Jet noise and auto traffic at the adjacent Terminal 5 aren't issues. "We want to give you the experience of aviation without making you hear it," says Erik Palmer, the hotel's managing director.

What that glass curtain couldn't silence: a chorus of complaints on the first night. The TWA Hotel opened its doors to customers May 15 with abundant kinks to exterminate and a deep sense that things could have been much, much smoother had the hotel waited a week or two to complete its finishing touches, 57 years nearly to the date Saarinen's original Trans World Flight Center was dedicated.

Many of the elevators went on strike around 4 p.m. just as the first guests checked in; the cashless hotel suffered glitches as servers tried to ring up drink orders, and the rooftop infinity pool deck was off limits because construction isn't finished.

The hotel has returned the TWA Flight Center's original Lisbon Lounge for cocktails and Paris Café, the latter run by celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. A restored Lockheed Constellation painted in TWA's livery sits outside the glass-walled lobby as a year-round cocktail lounge. In total there's a restaurant, three bars and a food hall, in varying states of readiness on the first day.

The 1960s design motifs extend to the guest rooms, which are geared to inspiring visions of 1962, the year of the first Jetsons episode, a time when Boeing's 707 was rapidly supplanting propellers for a speedier, more glamorous form of air travel.

Among the hotel's best amenities: blazing fast Wi-Fi throughout, likely faster than what you have at home (up to 400 megabits per second). "We paid extra for that," Palmer quipped — and so do guests with a mandatory $10 resort fee.

As you'd expect, rooms have that "new hotel smell," and guests can enjoy a fine rest in king or double rooms, so long as the housekeeping staff isn't overly chatty. There are also suites. And all should succeed in offering quiet.

The hotel's developer, MCR Development, has 94 hotels in 24 states and spent months evaluating the proper "aesthetic" for the rooms' sound design. How to eliminate airport noise was, of course, a key design consideration, said Victoria Cerami, chief executive officer of Cerami & Associates, the acoustical design firm that worked on the project, noting that the glass wall encircling the two room wings — Hughes and Saarinen — is seven panes, thicker than any other glass curtain wall save the U.S. Embassy in London.

Most people don't notice their sound environment "unless you become annoyed, and once you're annoyed you become hypervigilant" to the particular sounds causing your displeasure, Cerami said.

Once all the rough edges are smoothed, and the staff find their groove, the hotel will be a nice experience for the sort of traveler who wants a certain no-nonsense aesthetic and doesn't mind New York prices. (Hello, $6 cup of average drip coffee to go.)

What it does offer is an homage to a past era of aviation, restful sleep in quiet rooms, and the kind of marketable "story" with Instagrammable photos like sipping a cocktail while sitting inside a Lockheed Connie delivered to TWA in 1958.