The great American urban planner Daniel Burnham said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Governor Andrew Cuomo heeded that call earlier this month, when he announced a visionary plan for overhauling New York’s widely hated Pennsylvania Station.
The busiest transit hub in the country with 650,000 commuter rail and Amtrak riders per day, Penn Station, built in 1968, is not only dysfunctional, it is the most hated train station in America. As the governor observed, “Penn Station is un-New York. It is dark, it is constrained, it is ugly, it is dated architecture, it is a lost opportunity… Frankly it is a miserable experience… It is a terrible impression” of New York.
He contrasted the current station, which sits beneath Madison Square Garden, with the one it replaced: a Beaux-Arts masterpiece designed by McKim, Mead & White, which opened in 1910. As magnificent as Grand Central Terminal, it was modelled on the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla, and possessed soaring 150-foot-tall vaulted ceilings clad in marble. Cuomo noted that the original station had “majesty” and was “the grand and triumphant entrance that New York deserved.” A gift to the city from the privately owned railroad, it was an awe-inspiring public space that elevated the common man.
Alas, in 1963 the station was demolished. In an editorial at the time, the New York Times called it a “monumental act of vandalism,” an opinion seconded in more recent years by Michael Kimmelman, the paper’s present-day architecture critic. The widespread consensus is that the replacement of the original Penn Station by the current one was one of the great architectural and civic crimes of the 20th century.
To fix the many problems with the current station, the governor has called for a $3-billion public-private partnership that will extensively renovate the transportation depot, and connect it via tunnels to the new Amtrak Station to be built across Eighth Avenue in the old Farley Post Office (also designed by McKim, Mead & White). The two buildings would be called the Empire State Complex. Although civic design advocates such as the Municipal Arts Society and Regional Plan Association hope that a renovated Penn Station would include moving the eyesore Madison Square Garden to a different site, in the Cuomo proposal the arena would remain where it is.
Cuomo has given developers 90 days to submit proposals for the site. According to the architectural renderings, the renovations will include a sweeping glass curtain-wall entrance on Eighth Avenue. There will also be other new entrances and interiors that consist of slick glass boxes.
Unfortunately the architecture, like so much of what is built today, is banal and generic. Lacking any artistry or ties to New York, the new design is one-part contemporary corporate office building, one-part high-end shopping mall. The proposal is reminiscent of the (architecturally superior) shops at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, which are fronted by a glass curtain-wall. Majestic it is not.
Architectural historian Vince Scully famously said about the difference between the old and new Penn Station, “One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.” The plan the governor released at the press conference replaces the rats with upscale shoppers. And since Madison Square Garden will continue to squat on the station, it will be impossible to design a soaring hall. The renderings are suggestive, not final, plans, but they are indicative of the lack of majesty and monumentality we will almost surely get in any other design.
There is, however, an alternative guaranteed to equal the grandeur and majesty of the original Penn Station—namely, rebuilding the original Penn Station. This is no pipe dream. Based on the original drawings held in the archive of the New-York Historical Society, a team of architects and developers, spearheaded by the National Civic Art Society in conjunction with Richard W. Cameron of Atelier & Co., has prepared a master plan showing that such a reconstruction is both practically and economically feasible. It would of course incorporate the latest technology, and would be altered to suit the transportation needs of today, but the essentials of the concourses and exterior would remain. Furthermore, new computer and machining technology would allow the classical details to be constructed quickly and cost-effectively.
Rebuilding Penn Station would require removing Madison Square Garden as well as Two Penn Plaza, an ugly 29-story skyscraper that sits on top of the depot. Selling the air rights would make up for the lost square footage. Alternatively, or in conjunction, Beaux-Arts towers could be added to McKim’s design. (In fact, the Pennsylvania Railroad originally considered putting a hotel on top of it.)
Some will say that rebuilding a demolished structure such as Penn Station is “inauthentic” and fails to respect the “Spirit of our time.” This is a recent architectural ideology unique to the West, one that started gaining purchase after WWII with the rise of Modernism. Demonstrating a different perspective on time and “authenticity,” Japan’s holiest shrine is a wooden temple that for over a millennium has been torn down and rebuilt every 20 years.
Consider: If Grand Central Terminal burned down tomorrow, would we rebuild it? Surely we would. Why should it make a difference that Penn Station was destroyed not yesterday but 53 years ago? Certain masterpieces cannot be improved upon. They are the opposite of dated; they are timeless.
There is precedent for rebuilding demolished great buildings, such as the bombed-out historic centers of Dresden and Warsaw, as well as the 19th-century Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which was torn down by Stalin. There is also the Campanile in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, a 16th-century tower that was reconstructed in 1912 after it collapsed. Would Venice be better off without it?
McKim’s Penn Station is part of New York City’s patrimony. It was civic property stolen from New Yorkers, and indeed all Americans, and it should be returned to their rightful heirs: us.
The irony is that while opponents of classical architecture demand “innovation” and “novelty” at all costs, nothing would be more dramatic than rebuilding a magnificent civic temple. It would be an inspiring story of life after death, of urban resurrection.
Governor Cuomo is to be commended for his bold plans to revolutionize New York City’s foremost gateway. Rebuilding Penn Station is the best way to make that transformation a triumph.
