NEW YORK —The myth of the original Pennsylvania Station and its destruction has outlasted the actual structure. Torn down in the early 1960s and replaced by the current Madison Square Garden1, what remains is a claustrophobic basement. My father said Penn Station’s destruction “was a sin.” Many others did too.
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“One scuttles in now like a rat”2 in the subterranean remains of Penn Station.3 It’s an unpleasant experience at best and probably agony to travel through at rush hour. I only visited a few times and could not wait to leave.
In recent years, after much figurative hand-wringing over a generation or two, the experience coming in from the street is improved. The actual train shed is still more or less the same.
Fauxback train station
The former James Farley Post Office, across 8th Avenue from the existing Penn Station is now Moynihan Train Hall. Championed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the hall is an adaptive reuse with stone exterior and interior walls. It’s monumental and was contemporary to the 1910 station. The opening, in 2021, was almost two decades after its namesake died.
Natural light flows in through the glass ceiling structure. Restaurants, shops and lounges line the central plaza. Pylons with track numbers lead to escalators and stairs. It’s far from the claustrophobia I previously encounterd. Getting around is easy for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad4 passengers.5
Sitting is not.
Moynihan Hall lacks benches and chairs in the general area. Union Station in Washington, D.C. and seemingly every other new transit development shares this hostile architecture. Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, to its credit, has seating.
Even with improvements, I still rank Moynihan below D.C.’s Union and Philly’s 30th in overall grandeur. But it’s more than an incremental improvement at least. Perhaps more is to come (PBS)…
Footnotes
- Since it opened in 1969, it’s hosted all of four champions from its primary tenants, the NHL’s Rangers and NBA’s Knickerbockers. Yes, I’m calling them by their full name. Also, the last two times I traveled to New York, one of their major teams won it all that season. Behold my power. ↩︎
- Vincent Scully, the architectural critic, said that and it’s been quoted enough that I don’t even need a source. I wonder if Vin Scully felt the same way and if anybody ever asked him – he was a New Yorker until 1958 after all. ↩︎
- I have trouble typing this – I usually type Penn State out of habit. By the way, my two trips to MSG were for Penn State basketball because you can’t spell Nittany without N-I-T. ↩︎
- One of my great-grandfathers was a LIRR motorman. ↩︎
- NJ Transit though, that’s in the old station and not referenced much in Moynihan. ↩︎