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NEW YORK – A vintage aircraft, passing from passengers in the 1950s to drugs in the 1970s, went to Times Square on Saturday before its transformation into a cocktail bar in the former TWA terminal. Kennedy Airport.
The fuselage of the 1958 Lockheed Constellation spends the weekend in Times Square as part of an upcoming documentary on the redevelopment of Eero Saarinen's TWA flight center into a hotel.
The plane arrived in New York in November from Maine, where it was being restored.
It was trucked Friday night from Kennedy Airport to Times Square, where the same model appeared on an eight-story billboard in the late 1950s.
The Constellation, known as Connie, was stolen for TWA for three years before being forced to retire by the Boeing 707. It was then used as an Alaskan bush plane and then used as a marijuana dropper by South American drug traffickers.
The aircraft was purchased last year by MCR / MORSE Development, developers of the TWA Hotel that will soon open.
MCR's CEO, Tyler Morse, said that the aircraft of the day would serve as a cocktail bar at the hotel.
"We are trying to recreate the theater of the hotel and make it a special experience," he said Saturday.
The TWA Hotel, which has 512 rooms, is expected to open in May and will be the only hotel located on the grounds of the airport.
This is a tribute to the time when the TWA flight center, powered by a seagull bird, was opened in 1962. The terminal closed in 2001, the year of the acquisition of TWA by American Airlines.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has joined Morse on the occasion of an event intended to accommodate the aircraft in Times Square, said the TWA Historic Terminal would "become a hotel and a dynamic conference area, and to be part of our city again ".
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Associated Press reporter Julie Walker contributed to this report.
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