The main waiting hall of the original Penn Station, looking toward 33rd Street. The steps to the right lead up to the shopping arcade and 7th Avenue entrance.
Thirty years ago I was waiting for a train on the Amtrak concourse at Penn Station in New York, when I noticed a large framed black-and-white photograph hanging on the side of a pillar. The photo showed what looked like the inside of a great Roman temple, with stone walls, enormous fluted Corinthian columns, and a vaulted coffered ceiling with large lunette windows. I’d never seen this place before and thought it might be a photo of Grand Central Terminal, New York’s other major train station, but then I read the caption and it said “Penn Station, 1910.” I looked around for a long moment and thought, No way is this the same building as that. Then I saw another photo, showing what looked like a giant greenhouse but with no green; columns and arches of steel and glass fanning out overhead and in all directions, with austere chandeliers and a great clock hanging from above, gates and railings and staircases below. Turns out I was standing not far from the very spot where that photo had been taken eight decades prior, and again, I couldn’t believe that the dingy, oppressive, glorified underground mall around me was the same place.
The train concourse of the original Penn Station. Today, Madison Square Garden sits atop the concrete slab that lowered its ceiling in the mid-1960s.
These images were of the main waiting hall and train concourse, respectively, of perhaps the greatest work of urban architecture ever erected in the United States, the original Pennsylvania Station designed by the renowned architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. Opened to the public in 1910, it was a grand gateway to the City; a palace of honey-colored Travertine marble inside a fortress of pink Milford granite, with that great steel-and-glass concourse evoking the great train sheds of Europe while ingeniously moving people vertically and horizontally between concourses, trains, entrances and exits. It was a masterpiece of form and function.
Most people know the rest of the story; by the 1950s train travel had lost its edge to both the automobile and the airplane, and the old station turned grimy as the neighborhood around it deteriorated. Inside, all that beautiful marble faded, and those grand spaces and vistas grew cluttered with advertising and retail kiosks, as the once-great Pennsylvania Railroad struggled to make ends meet and had to cut back on maintenance and cleaning. Then an absurd new ticketing facility invaded the main waiting hall, disrupting the flow of foot traffic, its enormous fluorescent-lit clamshell canopy plunging the great room into a funereal darkness.
Finally, one drizzly morning in October 1963, the first of the great stone eagles perched atop the station’s columned entranceways was lifted from its perch and lowered to the ground. Bit by bit, section by section, the stone was jackhammered into oblivion and the steel was cut away, the still-working train station buried forever under concrete slabs as McKim’s masterpiece came down, and a new Madison Square Garden and adjoining office tower went up in its place.
When New York finally realized what it had lost, a new historic-preservation movement was born, one that helped save Grand Central Terminal from suffering the same fate as its lamented West Side counterpart. When, many years later, I discovered what Penn Station had once been, I did what I always do when something piques my interest: learned as much as I could. I picked up a copy of “The Late Great Pennsylvania Station” by Lorraine B. Diehl, and Steven Parissien’s “Pennsylvania Station” from the Phaidon Architecture in Detail series. I took a couple of the walking tours with Ms. Diehl that were sponsored by the 34th Street Partnership, examining the remnants of the original building that could still be found within the nooks and crannies and working spaces of the existing facility. Whenever I’d venture into the City, I’d keep my eyes open for any bits of glass flooring, steel and brass rails, signage, etc., still peeking out from the shadows of history.
At some point my gaze shifted across 8th Avenue to the Corinthian colonnade of the General Post Office, also known as the James A. Farley building, designed and built by McKim, Mead & White between 1911 and 1914 as a “companion” to Penn Station. When working radio broadcasts at the Garden in the mid-’90s I’d usually park my car in a garage on 31st Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, right across from the Farley building’s south façade. As I walked toward the Garden I’d look at the Farley building and think that maybe it could become, if not a replacement for, certainly a part of Penn Station, more akin to what had been unceremoniously destroyed in the 1960s than the subterranean rattrap into which it had been transformed.
As it turned out, I was not alone in that sentiment. Beginning in 1993, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was fond of the original Penn Station having shined shoes there as a boy during the Great Depression, championed the idea of repurposing the disused bulk of the vast Farley Post Office into a “new” Penn Station. In May 1999 Moynihan attended a ceremony in New York, at the Farley building, along with then-New York Governor George Pataki and President Bill Clinton, where the plan to do just that was first announced. “We can honor one of the first great public buildings of the 20th century and create the first great public building of the 21st century," Clinton said. Moynihan, recalling the “act of vandalism” that was the destruction of Penn Station, heralded the project as the first step in rectifying that great historical error. “If you ever knew the original,” he said, “you’ll be reborn to see what’s coming.”
And Governor Pataki added, “We're in the Farley building. Someday we're going to be in the Moynihan building."
That was in 1999. The new station was supposed to open in 2003. It didn’t. Moynihan died that year. The project went through multiple designs, delays, roadblocks, funding problems, etc.; way too much to talk about here. For a while it seemed like it would never happen.
Then, today, Moynihan’s dream — and mine — finally came true.
I got off the LIRR train on Track 21 at about 11:30 a.m., and made my way up to the West End Concourse, which was expanded as part of the new station project and sits just under the Post Office steps on the west side of 8th Avenue. From there it was a short walk to an escalator leading up to the entrance vestibule at 33rd and 8th, and the northeast corner of the new Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall, where I took my first look:
My first look at the new Train Hall.
I’d waited most of my adult life to see this, and here it was. Three massive steel trusses, over a century old, holding up a latticed concave glass canopy 92 feet above the marble floor; a full acre of open space, dominated by a massive artdeco clock suspended from the central truss. Escalators piercing the floor take riders up and down from Tracks 5 through 16, whose platforms extend far enough under the Farley Building to be reached from here. These tracks serve Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road trains; Tracks 1 through 4 serve New Jersey Transit, still relegated to the old Penn Station, while access to Tracks 17 through 21 (LIRR) is just a short walk to the West End Concourse mentioned above.
There’s another glass canopy above the mid-block atrium, built into the space that bisects the block between 8th and 9th Avenues, and joins the original 1914 Post Office building with the “annex” that doubled its size in the 1930s. This area has grand entrances on either side, on 31st and 33rd Streets through the original arched bays, with art installations on the ceilings, and will eventually be home to retail stores, a food court, and presumably, a passageway leading west to 9th Avenue (there is signage pointing to 9th Avenue but you have to exit the building to get there).
The new 33rd Street entrance, with arched windows framed by their original ornate metalwork.
As of today, the only retail operation in the new Train Hall is (of course) a Starbucks, but that will change later in the year; the upper level on the north (33rd Street) side of the hall and the mid-block atrium west of it will eventually be filled with places to shop and eat. Today was just a chance to see this brand-new, massive, grand public space in its purest form, when it’s nothing more or less than a train station. And what a train station it is, a veritable triumph of adaptive reuse. It’s not the original Penn Station; far from it. It’s certainly not Grand Central, still my favorite building in the City. But I have to say, it evokes the spirit of the original Penn Station (the train concourse, anyway) in a very real and palpable way. And it’s not just the steel-and-glass ceiling, the track entrances lined up across the floor, the vertical stanchions marking each one, or the enormous hanging clock exerting its dominance in stark black and white.
In comparing the “remodeled,” underground Penn Station to its lost Beaux-Arts predecessor, architectural historian Vincent Scully famously wrote, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” I can’t say that the experience of entering the new Train Hall made me feel “like a god”; it wasn’t like, for example, seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, but there was still a sense of awe that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to replicate. Indeed, my only complaint about the new facility was that the escalators near the center of the floor go down, while those closer to the ticketing areas on the west side of the Hall go up; the view coming up, entering the City, would be rather more impressive if these were reversed. But it’s an incredibly minor nit to pick. Everything else looks beautiful and seems to work beautifully; we’ll see how the new building handles a full load of commuters both before and after the shopping and dining areas open — and before and after the pandemic ends.
According to Governor Andrew Cuomo, who jump-started the project in 2017, the Moynihan Train Hall came in on-time and on-budget. Everyone knows there is more work to be done; the existing LIRR concourse at Penn Station is already undergoing yet another renovation (and thus feels even more oppressive than usual after walking through Moynihan), and even more ambitious projects including the long-stalled Gateway Program and the addition of more tracks south of the existing Penn Station, will be needed to address its capacity problems which the new Hall, for all its grandeur, does not solve.
But the opening of Moynihan Train Hall, today of all days, was something pretty special, both for the City of New York and for me personally. It was something I’d waited my whole adult life to see; I was nearly moved to tears when I finally saw it. But more than that, it was testament to the fact that we can still build things like this, great public spaces that are functional as well as pleasing to the eye, that preserve the past and embrace the future at the same time. The original Penn Station did that in 1910, merging the Greco-Roman grandeur of its central waiting hall with the industrial-age audacity of its train concourse; monumental beauty with ingenious functionality.
I used to think it was impossible to get anything built in New York. Yet at that ceremony in 1999, Senator Moynihan predicted that “we will find -- when we complete this project -- that suddenly all will seem possible.” It took more than two decades, and he didn’t live to see it, but oh, he was so right. The Moynihan Train Hall is a huge win for New York, a real triumph — one the City desperately needed, now more than ever. Suddenly, all seems possible.
