The TWA Headquarters

The story of how Kansas City became the headquarters of Trans World Airlines begins with Charles Lindbergh, three months after his solo flight across the Atlantic.

In August of nineteen twenty-seven, Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis at the new Kansas City airfield to dedicate it before ten thousand cheering people. He praised the city's central location and declared it had the potential to be the air capital of the United States. When a committee later convened to choose a home city for the merged airline that would become TWA, Lindbergh was their aviation advisor. He recommended Kansas City, and the committee agreed.

In October of nineteen thirty, TWA launched the first scheduled transcontinental air service in the United States, flying what they called the Lindbergh Route. It took thirty-six hours. The flight stopped overnight in Kansas City.

The building you are passing now, a three-story structure at Seventeen Thirty-Five Baltimore Avenue in the Crossroads, was built in nineteen fifty-six as TWA's corporate headquarters, the physical monument to all of that. Howard Hughes, who controlled TWA from nineteen thirty-nine to nineteen sixty and treated it as a personal instrument of ambition, had a one-third-scale model of the Moonliner Rocket, the same attraction TWA sponsored at Disneyland, planted on the rooftop.

TWA moved its headquarters to New York in nineteen sixty-four. The airline stumbled through mergers and bankruptcies for decades before American Airlines absorbed it in two thousand one. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand two and houses the TWA Museum today, a small institution preserving the era when Kansas City was the center of the American sky.