NEW YORK — There was a time when New York City had the gateway it deserved.
Demolished more than half a century ago, the former Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead & White was hardly the first great building in town to face the wrecking ball. The Lenox Library by Richard Morris Hunt and the old Waldorf-Astoria by Henry Hardenbergh on Fifth Avenue also came down. For generations, New Yorkers embraced the mantra of change, assuming that what replaced a beloved building would probably be as good or better.
The Frick mansion, by Carrère and Hastings, replaced the Lenox Library. The Empire State Building replaced the old Waldorf.
Then, a lot of bad architecture, amid other signs of postwar decline, flipped the optimistic narrative.
When Penn Station became during the mid-1960s a subterranean rat’s maze, the city seemed to be heading very definitely south. The historic preservation movement, which rose from the vandalized station’s ashes, was born of a new pessimism.
People today forget that the original station’s construction, shortly after the turn of the last century, caused its own tumult. Several midtown blocks needed to be leveled, which meant displacing thousands of residents from the largely African American community in what was once known as the Tenderloin district in Manhattan. The emptied lot, awaiting McKim’s masterpiece, now looks almost comically vast in photographs.
The building that opened in 1910 — its concourse longer than the nave of St. Peter’s in Rome, its creamy travertine quarried, like the ancient Colosseum’s, from Tivoli, its ceiling 138 feet high, its grand staircase nearly as wide as a basketball court — was a “beautiful beaux arts fortress,” as architect Vishaan Chakrabarti has put it.
Grand Central Terminal, at Park Avenue, by Warren and Wetmore, created a bustling new urban hub intricately woven into the fabric of the surrounding streets. By contrast, Penn Station had its fancy portes cochères for the railroad’s well-heeled customers, and 84 huge, somber Doric columns, with 22 roosting eagles guarding the entrances.
Inside and out, the building was meant to be uplifting and monumental — like the Parthenon on steroids — its train shed and waiting room a skylit symphony of almost overwhelming civic nobility, announcing the entrance to a modern metropolis.
With its swarming crowds and dust motes dancing in shafts of smoky light, the station was catnip to midcentury photographers, filmmakers, artists and architects. It was the architectural embodiment of New York’s vaulted ambition and open arms.
Alas, by the Depression, the building had already begun to decline, and by the mid-1950s, the Pennsylvania Railroad was bleeding money — a victim of cars, planes and general urban decline. Interstate highways and commercial air travel, buoyed by lavish government subsidies, were taking a toll on train ridership. Once bright and gleaming outside, the station, which cost a fortune to maintain, was increasingly grimy, like the streets around it. Shops were shuttering where businessmen who missed the 5:45 to Morristown used to pick up chocolates for their wives.
On top of which, as Ada Louise Huxtable, the former New York Times architecture critic, wrote in 1966: “Functionally, the station was considerably less than noble. The complexity and ambiguity of its train levels and entrances and exits were a constant frustration.” Except for its glass-and-iron waiting room, she added, the station “was a better expression of ancient Rome than of 20th-century America.”
So it wasn’t altogether shocking when railroad executives offered the air rights for the property for $50 million (nearly 10 times that amount in today’s dollars). New York could downsize its station, stick it underground, add a sports arena and office tower on top and reboot itself for the rest of the century. To pragmatists, that sounded like progress.
In retrospect, entombed beneath Madison Square Garden and a commercial building too mediocre to rise even to the level of good or bad, the new Penn Station represented a city disdainful of its gloried architectural past.
Replacing the old station involved an engineering feat: sliding a gigantic steel deck over the working tracks and platforms so the station could still function even while the drum-shaped Garden rose above it.
Surreal photographs show crowds in the old waiting room seemingly oblivious to the wrecking crews dismembering the station around them. Moody black-and-white images of a half-demolished train shed bring to mind scenes of London during the Blitz or the crumbling ruins of ancient Babylon.
The sculpted eagles lowered by cranes from atop the giant columns look like flags at half-mast. Older salarymen with their hats on and younger ones without hats passed beneath banners hung from the columns promising a new era. A sign in one of the station’s underground hallways read, “Close It We Must To Build Your New Station.”
Conceived to handle fewer than 200,000 passengers, the replacement Penn Station is today the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere, through which more than 600,000 commuters pass each day — an experience as humiliating and bewildering as Grand Central remains inspiring and exalted.
Plans by Albany to paint lipstick on the pig, widening some corridors and extending the station into the old McKim-designed Post Office across Eighth Avenue are only reminders of what was lost.
New Yorkers deserve a better gateway. Half a century later, the city is still waiting.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.