jerseyshorejohnny
Well-known member
New York’s Penn Station Needs a Resurrection, Not a Redecoration
The subterranean railway maze is a nightmare. Bring back the glorious station torn down in the 1960s.
By CATESBY LEIGH / Wall Street Journal
Aug. 12, 2016
In 1961, a mere half-century after New York City’s Pennsylvania Station opened, the once-mighty but now financially moribund Pennsylvania Railroad cut a deal with a private developer that led to its demolition. The result was the worst trade-off in American architectural history, one that would make historic preservation a popular cause. The grandeur of the old station’s interior was supplanted by a glassy office-tower slab and the cylindrical pile of Madison Square Garden.
Now—finally—change appears to be coming. New York State and Amtrak officials, led by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, want to overhaul the underground maze that replaced the old station. Penn is the busiest transportation facility in the country, swarmed by passengers of the Long Island Rail Road, NJ Transit, Amtrak and the New York City subway. Each weekday, 650,000 people make their way through the entrails of this dystopian complex—“mashed,” just as Progressive Architecture magazine forewarned after the destruction got under way in 1963, “into subterranean passageways like ancient Christians.”
In January, Gov. Cuomo unveiled a three-year, $3 billion plan to create an “Empire Station Complex.” The proposal, however, amounts to a quick fix—one bound to yield what the late urbanist Henry Hope Reed would call a raisin cake with the raisins in one place and the cake in another.
Under the plan, the existing Penn Station would retain the bulk of its functions. Amtrak and a portion of the Long Island Rail Road’s facilities would be moved into the mostly dormant James A. Farley Post Office Building across the street to the west. A new glass-canopied train hall there, to be named in honor of the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, would be luxuriantly ringed by retail.
There seems to be more glass and shopping glitz in this scenario than civic vision and sound planning. Amtrak accounts for only about 5% of Penn Station’s traffic. Most commuters would still be stuck with the existing catacombs, more or less spiffed up.
True, it was Moynihan who originally advocated converting Farley into an Amtrak station. What a pity he didn’t live to see Brooklyn architect Richard Cameron’s visionary proposal to reconstruct the original Pennsylvania Station. The foundations and train platforms of the old station are in place (though the latter will require rearrangement), and an enormous trove of drawings—plans, sections, elevations, exterior and interior details—is archived along with construction specifications at the New-York Historical Society.
A “new-old” Pennsylvania Station would be a magnificent gateway to New York. Like Dresden’s glorious Frauenkirche, the faithful reconstruction of which was completed 60 years after the building’s destruction by Allied bombs, the original Penn Station was not architecture “of its time” but architecture for all time.
The breathtaking waiting room, largely clad in travertine, was 300 feet long and 110 feet wide—larger than the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and “vast enough to hold the sound of time,” as the novelist Thomas Wolfe put it in the 1930s. “Men came and went, they passed and vanished . . . but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.” Light flooded in from eight lofty, semicircular windows. With its handsome mural maps and majestic Corinthian columns, the waiting room rivaled the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol as the nation’s greatest civic interior.
Mr. Cameron’s vision is of a rebuilt station that would pulse with the commercial life of the city. It would be a place for people to hang out instead of just passing through—a stupendous public resort like Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The hitch is that for Penn Station to expand vertically, Madison Square Garden must move. In 2013 New York’s city council voted 47–1 to extend the Garden’s operating permit for only a decade. The message to its owners, who had sought an extension in perpetuity, was explicit: You need to build a new Garden elsewhere. An attractive option is to build it within the capacious classical envelope of the Farley Post Office Building, now owned by the Empire State Development Corporation.
That would leave Pennsylvania Station free to rise. Mr. Cameron puts the cost of rebuilding the original Penn at $2.5 billion. Demolition of the Garden and office tower could raise the cost to $3 billion. But even under existing zoning, the station’s reconstruction would yield millions of square feet of transferable air rights that would make a big dent in that price tag.
The city or state would presumably facilitate the Garden’s move with some kind of incentives package. But private enterprise would have the leading role in Pennsylvania Station’s rebirth. A replay of the $3.9 billion taxpayer blowout that yielded that white elephant—OK, white stegosaurus—of a new World Trade Center transit hub in downtown Manhattan is not feasible.
A rebuilt Pennsylvania Station could be the crown jewel of an immensely challenging transportation and urban redevelopment agenda that includes a much-needed new railway tunnel under the Hudson. What’s missing is vision among movers and shakers in New York, Albany and Washington, D.C. Time-consuming environmental-impact reviews for the Moynihan train hall are complete; once a development team has been selected, Gov. Cuomo can be expected to push his quick fix aggressively. But he will encounter plenty of opposition, because his plan is unworthy of America’s greatest city.
Mr. Leigh writes about public art and architecture and lives in Washington, D.C. This is adapted from the summer issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
The subterranean railway maze is a nightmare. Bring back the glorious station torn down in the 1960s.
By CATESBY LEIGH / Wall Street Journal
Aug. 12, 2016
In 1961, a mere half-century after New York City’s Pennsylvania Station opened, the once-mighty but now financially moribund Pennsylvania Railroad cut a deal with a private developer that led to its demolition. The result was the worst trade-off in American architectural history, one that would make historic preservation a popular cause. The grandeur of the old station’s interior was supplanted by a glassy office-tower slab and the cylindrical pile of Madison Square Garden.
Now—finally—change appears to be coming. New York State and Amtrak officials, led by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, want to overhaul the underground maze that replaced the old station. Penn is the busiest transportation facility in the country, swarmed by passengers of the Long Island Rail Road, NJ Transit, Amtrak and the New York City subway. Each weekday, 650,000 people make their way through the entrails of this dystopian complex—“mashed,” just as Progressive Architecture magazine forewarned after the destruction got under way in 1963, “into subterranean passageways like ancient Christians.”
In January, Gov. Cuomo unveiled a three-year, $3 billion plan to create an “Empire Station Complex.” The proposal, however, amounts to a quick fix—one bound to yield what the late urbanist Henry Hope Reed would call a raisin cake with the raisins in one place and the cake in another.
Under the plan, the existing Penn Station would retain the bulk of its functions. Amtrak and a portion of the Long Island Rail Road’s facilities would be moved into the mostly dormant James A. Farley Post Office Building across the street to the west. A new glass-canopied train hall there, to be named in honor of the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, would be luxuriantly ringed by retail.
There seems to be more glass and shopping glitz in this scenario than civic vision and sound planning. Amtrak accounts for only about 5% of Penn Station’s traffic. Most commuters would still be stuck with the existing catacombs, more or less spiffed up.
True, it was Moynihan who originally advocated converting Farley into an Amtrak station. What a pity he didn’t live to see Brooklyn architect Richard Cameron’s visionary proposal to reconstruct the original Pennsylvania Station. The foundations and train platforms of the old station are in place (though the latter will require rearrangement), and an enormous trove of drawings—plans, sections, elevations, exterior and interior details—is archived along with construction specifications at the New-York Historical Society.
A “new-old” Pennsylvania Station would be a magnificent gateway to New York. Like Dresden’s glorious Frauenkirche, the faithful reconstruction of which was completed 60 years after the building’s destruction by Allied bombs, the original Penn Station was not architecture “of its time” but architecture for all time.
The breathtaking waiting room, largely clad in travertine, was 300 feet long and 110 feet wide—larger than the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and “vast enough to hold the sound of time,” as the novelist Thomas Wolfe put it in the 1930s. “Men came and went, they passed and vanished . . . but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.” Light flooded in from eight lofty, semicircular windows. With its handsome mural maps and majestic Corinthian columns, the waiting room rivaled the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol as the nation’s greatest civic interior.
Mr. Cameron’s vision is of a rebuilt station that would pulse with the commercial life of the city. It would be a place for people to hang out instead of just passing through—a stupendous public resort like Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The hitch is that for Penn Station to expand vertically, Madison Square Garden must move. In 2013 New York’s city council voted 47–1 to extend the Garden’s operating permit for only a decade. The message to its owners, who had sought an extension in perpetuity, was explicit: You need to build a new Garden elsewhere. An attractive option is to build it within the capacious classical envelope of the Farley Post Office Building, now owned by the Empire State Development Corporation.
That would leave Pennsylvania Station free to rise. Mr. Cameron puts the cost of rebuilding the original Penn at $2.5 billion. Demolition of the Garden and office tower could raise the cost to $3 billion. But even under existing zoning, the station’s reconstruction would yield millions of square feet of transferable air rights that would make a big dent in that price tag.
The city or state would presumably facilitate the Garden’s move with some kind of incentives package. But private enterprise would have the leading role in Pennsylvania Station’s rebirth. A replay of the $3.9 billion taxpayer blowout that yielded that white elephant—OK, white stegosaurus—of a new World Trade Center transit hub in downtown Manhattan is not feasible.
A rebuilt Pennsylvania Station could be the crown jewel of an immensely challenging transportation and urban redevelopment agenda that includes a much-needed new railway tunnel under the Hudson. What’s missing is vision among movers and shakers in New York, Albany and Washington, D.C. Time-consuming environmental-impact reviews for the Moynihan train hall are complete; once a development team has been selected, Gov. Cuomo can be expected to push his quick fix aggressively. But he will encounter plenty of opposition, because his plan is unworthy of America’s greatest city.
Mr. Leigh writes about public art and architecture and lives in Washington, D.C. This is adapted from the summer issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.