The New Penn Station Doesn’t Have to Be Pretty

The first week in January, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled a $3 billion plan for a new Penn Station—the fifth such proposal in the past 25 years. “Let’s be as bold and ambitious as our forefathers,” Cuomo said in his announcement. The renderings were anything but an homage to past visions of grandeur. Although a 1999 scheme featured a hall with a two-floor concourse, two levels of additional tracks, and a spectacular steel-and-glass canopy, this one, with low-slung skylights, resembled the atrium at the Short Hills mall. The plans had more detractors than drunk Rangers fans taking the A train home after a game upstairs at Madison Square Garden. “Penn Station’s 5th Redesign Fails to Charm Some Critics,” read a New York Times headline. That was about the kindest sentiment expressed.

It would be a gross understatement to say the current Penn Station also fails to charm. It sees 600,000 subway, commuter, and intercity customers a day, three times what it was built to serve. A dirty, dark, crowded underground warren, it’s a shadow of the original grand neoclassical structure designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1910 and torn down in 1963 when not enough people thought it was worth saving: We were all going to be getting around like the Jetsons soon enough. (Oops.) There was almost-instant regret: The demolition fueled the formation of the NYC Landmark Preservation Commission, which saved Grand Central Terminal from the same fate.