A (sporadic user’s) defense of Penn Station
Condemning the urban transportation folly that is Penn Station has become something of a cottage industry for architecture and urban design enthusiasts. It has been compared variably to “bowels,” “purgatory,” “an abyss,” where commuters “scuttle in like rat[s].”
Penn Station is, unsurprisingly, the nation’s busiest rail hub, serving over 650,000 travelers per day, or more than the city’s three major airports combined. Its detractors claim, with reason, that such a distinction should warrant a grander, more beautiful design. And its proximity to the new commercial district in Hudson Yards has brought Penn Station a new relevance and an urgency to its renewal.
Grand Central Terminal across town serves fewer than half Penn’s daily take, but it’s soaring 1912 concourse has made it one of the city’s biggest tourist draws. And the $4+ billion World Trade Center “Transportation Hub” serves about a tenth of Penn’s passengers but is effectively a shiny white mall.
But for all its shortcomings, there is something exhilarating, desperately utilitarian and quintessentially New York about the crowded labyrinth of Penn Station.
I admit I’ve only traveled through Penn Station a couple handfuls of times — mostly to take the NJ Transit to Newark Airport. But every successive time I do, I flatter myself with the increasing ease with which I find I can navigate its messy logic. I pride myself as, if not a real New Yorker, a real…New Jersey commuter?
I hustle down the escalator at 32nd Street, dodging tourists and the beggars that make the station a sort of permanent home. I slide across the marble floor to the ticket machines and jab through the prompts as effortlessly as an MTA machine. (I usually have given myself more than enough time but I enjoy partaking in the permanent hustle Penn engenders, for most I imagine out of the desire to leave it as quickly as possible.)
I descend half a flight to join the crowds who’ve pinned their eyes to the analog train schedule, waiting for their train’s track assignment. Doddle north across the main concourse and you can grab a Starbucks or a slice and a Bud Lite for the journey. But when that track assignment comes, crack! like a horse race the throngs flood toward a track entrance that is barely two people wide.
Once down another escalator at the track level, a sort of deep, quiet awe overcomes me, which I can’t sufficiently explain. The track catacombs feel ancient, in a dark, chilly way the subway tunnels never do. You almost feel like you could be below a great train hall in Europe, but no you’re in New York! You know logically this dank basement is part and parcel of the Northeast corridor’s great bottleneck, but here, with the punctual digital clocks and conductors with their tidy uniforms, everything seems to work OK.
Over at Amtrak, the glamour factor is elevated slightly — you can find sushi and a wine store, as well as a waiting room for Acela passengers sealed from the riffraff by a wall of frosted glass. But pity the Amtrak passenger who boarded in one of the great Beaux-Arts stations in Washington D.C. or Philadelphia,whose grand entree to New York is a gaggle of drunk Rangers fans screaming in a glorified bunker with 8-foot ceilings and a waft of Aunt Annie’s mixed with BO.
I admire the poker-faced determination and world-weariness exuded by those who brave these tunnels twice daily. You can identify them outside too, sometimes blocks away, walking in the middle of traffic, bags clutched, steeling towards home in Montclair or Massapequa.
After having navigated your way through Penn’s spaghetti bowl a number of times, you begin to feel like an insider of some kind of underground, not-so-exclusive club. But you also learn that despite the crowds and the shabby architecture and the less-than-desirable food options, the place actually works, and it works thanks to a perverse logic.
Any cursory glance at a station map (an inconvenience apparently few cursing newbies venture to attempt) will yield a fairly straightforward understanding of layout: Amtrak is located directly under Madison Square Garden along Eighth Avenue on the first level down, NJ Transit on the same level but on the Seventh Avenue side, and LIRR on the level below that. Connection to the A/C/E subway lines along Eighth Avenue and the 1/2/3 lines along Seventh Avenue is seamless (no need to go up to street level) and well-signed. And of course the hundreds of thousands of sports fans and concertgoers who pack Madison Square Garden every year appreciate the uber-proximity to four mass transit systems.
Penn Station’s detractors fall into two main camps: the aesthetes, architectural historians, and Euro- and train-romantics who mourn the soaring McKim, Mead & White train palace demolished in 1963; and the transportation planners, elected officials and rationalists who begrudge the transportation bottleneck throbbing with NJ Transit and Amtrak trains under the Hudson River.
Both camps have reason to gripe and both have been clamoring louder and louder for a Penn replacement pretty much since the modern iteration arrived in 1964.
As train travel fell victim to the spiderwebbing of the interstate highway system and cheaper jet travel in the 1950s, the struggling Pennsylvania Railroad sold its air rights to a businessman who promised an office complex and sports arena above a shrunken, fully submerged Penn Station. The demolition of the above-ground train hall, inspired by the Baths at Caracalla, was one of the great tragedies of New York’s urban history. So shocking a blow it was to its defenders (including, famously, Jackie Kennedy Onassis), it sparked a blessing in disguise in the form of the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the birth of the modern historic preservation movement in the US.
To the second group of Penn haters, the station itself isn’t the gross offender, but it represents the dire and worsening condition of public transportation infrastructure in the region, if not the entire nation. When Pennsylvania Railroad sold its air rights in the 1960s, the business of passenger rail travel was in sharp decline. But along the Northeast corridor at least, rail use— both for commuting and intercity travel — has been gaining steam for years and shows no signs of abetting. Amtrak’s DC-Boston Acela is the service’s sole profitable line.
In 2010, New Jersey governor Chris Christie abruptly cancelled NJ Transit’s $9 billion endeavor to construct a second trans-Hudson link between Newark and New York Penn Station, a year after ground was broken. The embattled Republican with eyes set on higher office claimed New York wasn’t stumping up its fair share, even though it was New Jersey commuters who would far and away stand to benefit. Christie took a lot of flack for that. But…
A year later, Amtrak announced plans for a new tunnel of its own that would mostly parallel the existing tunnel and the aborted NJ Transit tunnel. That project is estimated to begin construction in 2019 or 2020 and open by 2024. As of 2015, the states of New York and New Jersey reached a funding deal with the federal government. How the new administration will view what Obama called the nation’s most pressing infrastructure project remains to be seen.
In conjunction, last year saw the revelation of Governor Cuomo’s commitment to expand the Amtrak and LIRR ticketing and waiting areas into the Farley Post Office across the street. That proposal has actually been around since the early 1990s, and will be named for its original proponent, the late US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Conveniently, the complex sits above the existing railyard, and the design proposes floating a glass ceiling over the Farley courtyard to create an appealing, light-filled train hall with plenty of retail to boot.
Easy! The majority of the $1.6 billion overhaul will be covered by a private consortium of developers and the architecture and preservation junkies get a reprise of their lost love in the Beaux-Arts 1912 Farley building (much of which is currently inaccessible to the public or has suffered years of neglect). And with the East Side Access to bring LIRR trains to Grand Central around 2022, the only tenant of the original three to remain entirely under Madison Square Garden will be NJ Transit. Everyone wins! (Except maybe Jersey, but, you know.)
But this being New York City, not everyone is, ahem, on board. New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and former City Planning Commissioner Vishaan Chakrabarti floated a moonshot that entails booting MSG to the western end of the post office site and reclaiming the cylindrical arena structure as a glassy atrium. The Cuomo compromise doesn’t go far enough they say.
The Regional Plan Association has for years been calling for the region’s transit agencies to cooperate on a plan to facilitate “through-running” so passengers can travel between New Jersey and Long Island, say, without having to transfer in Manhattan, to better reflect changing commute patterns.
But all things considered, it’s a miracle the regional transportation trifecta of East Side Access, Gateway and Moynihan are finally coming together at the same time with few major bumps (hold your breath). It’s good enough for now. By the time all three projects move towards completion in the next decade, who is to say how the region’s transportation demands will have changed and adapted? Besides, it can be useful to keep around a dark, leaky, barely acceptable train station — it reminds us what our priorities are and keeps us focused on continually changing the city for the better. And a crowded, well-worn station deserves much more pride than a gleaming but abandoned boondoggle.
