New York's Penn Station Needs a Resurrection, Not a Redecoration

The subterranean railway maze is a nightmare. Bring back the glorious station torn down in the 1960s.

In 1961, a mere half-century after New York City’s Pennsylvania Station opened, the once-mighty but now financially moribund Pennsylvania Railroad cut a deal with a private developer that led to its demolition. The result was the worst trade-off in American architectural history, one that would make historic preservation a popular cause. The grandeur of the old station’s interior was supplanted by a glassy office-tower slab and the cylindrical pile of Madison Square Garden.

Now—finally—change appears to be coming. New York State and Amtrak officials, led by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, want to overhaul the underground maze that replaced the old station. Penn is the busiest transportation facility in the country, swarmed by passengers of the Long Island Rail Road, NJ Transit, Amtrak and the New York City subway. Each weekday, 650,000 people make their way through the entrails of this dystopian complex—“mashed,” just as Progressive Architecture magazine forewarned after the destruction got under way in 1963, “into subterranean passageways like ancient Christians.”

In January, Gov. Cuomo unveiled a three-year, $3 billion plan to create an “Empire Station Complex.” The proposal, however, amounts to a quick fix—one bound to yield what the late urbanist Henry Hope Reed would call a raisin cake with the raisins in one place and the cake in another.

Under the plan, the existing Penn Station would retain the bulk of its functions. Amtrak and a portion of the Long Island Rail Road’s facilities would be moved into the mostly dormant James A. Farley Post Office Building across the street...

Read the entire piece here in The Wall Street Journal

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Catesby Leigh writes about public art and architecture and lives in Washington, D.C.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal