Op-Ed Contributors
By TOM SCOCCA and CHOIRE SICHA
Published: November 22, 2010
MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG and other dignitaries took up ceremonial sledgehammers and knocked over a ceremonial wall of blocks. This was last month, across Eighth Avenue from Pennsylvania Station, and the little drama was meant to symbolize the beginning of its end. Behind them were the wide stairs and Corinthian colonnade of the Farley Post Office, the intended home of Moynihan Station, a scheme that the mayor said “reflects the splendor and majesty of the city.” Representative Jerrold Nadler called the future station “a space worthy of New York.” Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood was there to oversee this ridiculous impeachment as well. “Another step out of history’s shadow,” he said.
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Jorge Colombo
Simply everyone agrees on this anti-Penn Station sentiment. It is civic shame as civic pride, the city’s shared and ritualized regret over the demolition — “vandalism,” Mr. LaHood said; “desecration,” Mr. Nadler said — of the old Penn Station.
Oh, yes, the Old Penn Station! One hundred years ago this week, its “architectural, mechanical and other wonders” were formally opened to 100,000 travelers and rubberneckers, this paper wrote. (“Station Operated Without Confusion ... Trains for the Most Part on Time.”) And the interior? Apparently, actual stars, pulled from the heavens and set in crystal sockets, once twinkled in the unimaginable heights of the ceiling of its great hall; the seats below were made of polished chestnut wood and narwhal tusk. Their cushions? Stuffed with the down of baby eagles. Temple maidens with degrees in comparative literature would ring silver bells to inform each passenger that his train was ready for boarding.
Then, in the ’60s, this splendorous paradise was decapitated by its floundering original owner, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and surrounded by ugly office buildings that were a last, desperate gasp for profitability. The lamentations began before the bulldozers, and have continued for half a century.
What has been forgotten in this hysterical nostalgia is that our current Penn Station is also a miracle: pitiless and comically jury-rigged, sure, but miraculous. Three railroads and two subway lines deliver more than half a million people each day directly to almost anywhere except Grand Central. It is one of the great achievements of New York.
Don’t stop to contemplate, if you’re there — you’ll be trampled. This holiday season, the quicker you shove your fellow passengers, the quicker you can shove off from Aunt Gladys’s. Find an exit — there are plenty of exits, which is one of the many underappreciated features of this completely unappreciated anti-landmark — and get out fast.
There. Where are you? You are in New York.
The city beneath our city is a delightfully ill-lighted, incomprehensibly organized, low-ceilinged, viewless labyrinth. Harried people surge through its concourses and tunnels in perpendicular lines, mean salmon in puffy coats going always upstream. Soldiers with combat weapons lurk outside the city’s most unhygienic group lavatories. There is nowhere to sit. The “talking kiosk” that serves the visually impaired has been heckling Long Island Rail Road customers with chirping for so long that we have begun to associate birdsong with the most terrible things.
“Through it one entered the city like a god ... one scuttles in now like a rat,” the architectural historian Vincent Scully wrote, in the most quoted aphorism about why it is our duty to adulate Old Penn Station and despise the current one. But this Penn Station is not here to flatter you. It is here to move you, if you know where you are going. If you know where you are going, it will deliver you on your personal atomized commuter-trail, through the entrance of your choice, down the crazy dark stairs you want, to the very door you want of the train you want. Why should you be forced through a grand entrance and into a mob of thousands of people on the floor of a great hall, if all you desire is the 7:49 to Flushing?
It’s fair, though, to complain that Penn Station is brutal to strangers. The basics aren’t that difficult. Please. It’s just an avenue-block-wide rectangle. But would it kill someone, for example, to put up a few more maps, and of considerably less confusing quality? You can find one by the handicapped elevator at the Long Island Railroad exit on 34th Street, if you can find the hallway at all. (It’s next to the doorman whose full-time job appears to be preventing the confused from straying into One Penn Plaza.)
Because everyone agrees that Penn Station is a failure, nobody has ever tried to make it anything other than baffling to the outsider. That’s the famous welcoming spirit of New York! The Long Island Rail Road has no interest in telling anyone how to get to New Jersey Transit, and vice versa. No one is in charge of knitting it all together, or no one bothers to. It’s bad bureaucracy and bad faith, not bad design — though at least our bureaucracies reflect our metro-area standoffishness.
The glory of Penn Station, then, is that it is composed of these self-involved city-states. Grand Central is a monoculture, all Mad Men in trench coats who are too snooty to live in Journal Square (Jersey City, dear, no) or the Five Towns (Queens-adjacent? Never.) but too exhausted for the city.
But here? Here we have the shiny floors of Amtrak, its waiting room as psychically comfy as any Midwestern hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit. The cheaper wonks from Washington and the lesser bankers from Boston wait here alongside real Americans (those are the ones with luggage).
Up at the other end, in the beige waiting area of New Jersey Transit, Frank’s Big and Tall clients from Ho-Ho-Kus stumble up and down little stairways and past the cheery yet ultimately funereal glassed-in public art installation showing New Jersey’s transportation history.
The Long Island Rail Road concourse is a dungeon-land of troll people and Irish workers in plaster dust and union T-shirts. In the summers, they are joined incongruously by chatty gays on the Montauk line. Together, passengers lurk in the dark, folded pizza in one hand, lunch mini-cooler in the other.
Between these insane kingdoms, Rangers fans and ageless metalheads come inbound to the Garden. Mets, Jets and Giants fans stream outbound.
This is a diorama of our recent history. People love to say they miss the ragged, gritty, vivid aura of New York in the ’70s. Yet it still lives! Down in the corridors of Penn Station, you can appreciate how much effort it takes to hold off entropy. Think of it as a ’70s theme park, but without gangs or muggers or hookers roaming around ... very frequently.
It is the careful chaos of this commuting ballet and the marvelous cultural freeze-frame of our city that the worshipful cult of the Old Penn Station want to destroy.
The Long Island Rail Road is supposed to be moved by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority across town, to Grand Central — that is, into a subterranean complex in the dirt below Grand Central, no more or less inherently attractive than Penn Station. This extravagant move puts the trains merely 5,000 or so feet closer to Long Island, shaving perhaps tens of seconds from each commute. And New Jersey Transit riders will get to their trains via Moynihan Station, and Amtrak will stay where it is, or both will move, or neither, depending on which iteration of the plan exists at the time of digging.
Regardless, for our politicians and preservationists the model for an appropriately majestic rail hub seems to be Washington’s Union Station, which is actually a shopping mall, and that is likely what we will get. The real long game here is, as with so many of the recent reinventions of New York, the eventual creation of millions of square feet of new retail and office space.
In exchange, some of us get to look at some pillars on the way underground. Because if you’ve seen the renderings of Phase One of Moynihan Station, there by the post office, there is no majestic hall. There is no grand, starry entrance waiting at the top of that bizarrely wide stairway. Instead, there will be an unimposing little doorway down in each corner of the eastern facade of the post office — leading to a sunken concourse, parallel to Eighth Avenue and not even below the building proper, but tucked under the steps. The concourse of the future will connect nicely with the Long Island Rail Road’s dingy airplane-hangar corridor that runs along 33rd Street.
So your much-hated, quite-glorious Penn Station isn’t going away after all. It’s actually taking over the neighborhood.
Tom Scocca is the author of the blog Scocca on Slate and the forthcoming “Beijing Welcomes You.” Choire Sicha is the co-editor of the Web site The Awl.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 23, 2010, on page A33 of the New York edition..
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