Top Comments: the once and future NY Penn Station edition

A lost architectural gem … which may get a facelift, after the jump ….

But first: Top Comments appears nightly, as a round-up of the best comments on Daily Kos. Surely ... you come across comments daily that are perceptive, apropos and .. well, perhaps even humorous. But they are more meaningful if they're well-known ... which is where you come in (especially in diaries/stories receiving little attention).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Send your nominations to TopComments at gmail dot com by 9:30 PM Eastern Time nightly, or by our KosMail message board. Please indicate (a) why you liked the comment, and (b) your Dkos user name (to properly credit you) as well as a link to the comment itself.

Regular readers know of my being a train aficionado; devoting a previous TC edition of TC to multi-modal stations of today. This edition will look back at a past event … with a silver lining for the future.

In architecture circles when the year 2000 was approaching: the list of 20th Century achievements were discussed, in detail. But as to their bad lists, most experts listed the demolition of New York’s Pennsylvania Station (Penn Station in common parlance) at/near #1 on the Architectural Crimes of the Century.

Built in 1910 by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, it was profiled back in 2014 with a fine PBS special, The Rise & Fall of Penn Station— noting the building used 27k tons of steel, 500k cubic feet of granite, 83k sq ft of skylights and 17 million bricks. The documentary’s main drawback being that it spent much more time about The Rise (quite uplifting) than the Fall — the demolition of which began in 1963 and was planned quite in secret. A building meant to be built for the ages …. lasted just a little over fifty years.

Original NY Penn Station street level (c. 1911)

The full PBS special (with a free trailer) is available on YouTube for a fee— there is a shorter free History Channel video below on the subject.

x xYouTube Video

It was built as the public facade of a monumental civic engineering project by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR or Pennsy) — to no longer transport rail passengers to New Jersey and then use ferries for the trip across the Hudson River and East Rivers. When completed, it provided seamless travel along the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston (and other locations).

The president who authorized not only the building but also the rail tunnels and station platforms was Alexander Cassatt (the brother of the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt) who died in 1906, four years before his brainchild opened. While you will hear the station then (and today) called Penn Station — the PRR had other big city rail depots also called Penn Station (such as Newark, Baltimore and Pittsburgh). Its station in its headquarters city of Philadelphia is called 30th Street Station today. Amtrak today refers to the current Manhattan station as New York Penn (NYP). 

Pennsylvania Railroad HQ, Philadelphia

It would take an entire diary to cover the reasons for its downfall — the advent of the interstate highways, jet air travel, people moving to the suburbs … and the Pennsy recording its first operating loss in 1947. A former NY Times architect critic wondered if the Pennsy was preparing the public for its demise: first by cutting-back on maintenance, then by “modernizing” the building in 1958, swapping some of its grandeur for overt tackiness.

The other main reason was the desire to retire that era’s Madison Square Garden (MSG) — several blocks north at 8th Avenue & 50th Street — and find a new home. The Pennsylvania Railroad sold the air rights to enable the fourth incarnation of the Garden (which I will address in a future TC) to be built on top of the mezzanine and train platforms of Penn Station — in the space being vacated by the demolition of the main building. The photo below from March 1968 shows the last night at the “old” Garden.

End: March, 1968  “Tomorrow, New Garden”

After much inertia/disbelief, there were protests in the early 1960’s — including this photo of a warm August evening in 1962—  and still others who argued that the rail portion could be scaled-down, and office space be leased to reduce the operating costs — but it fell upon deaf ears.

       Action Group for Better Architecture in New York (AGBANY)

Beginning in 1963 (and ending in 1966) the demolition did act as a wake-up call for New Yorkers. The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission — a purely advisory body in 1962 — had been given regulatory authority, to at least act as a check on such an act. And in the next decade … it was used to prevent a similar demolition.

In the 70’s, there were plans to demolish the city’s other rail gem, Grand Central— which was not as large an edifice, yet had its own 1913 grandeur. The bankrupt Penn Central Railroad— the result of a merger between the Pennsy and the New York Central — wanted to do something similar, demolish the upper building and leave only the downstairs area for passengers. And it had gone into NY State court in order to do that, appealing the decision against them on whether the denial was a "taking" in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

This became one of the rare times that Jacqueline Kennedy (Onassis, then) took on a public role, along with the city’s consumer affairs commissioner Bess Myerson in this January 1975 photo. She led public campaigns in support of the city’s preservation laws …. and a June, 1978 decision by the US Supreme Court upheld the preservation law (by a vote of 6-3) — and thus, Grand Central itself. There was even a young adults book published about her efforts.

Architect Philip Johnson, Jacqueleine Kennedy Onassis, Bess Myerson and then Rep. Ed Koch (two years later, mayor)

Today, for any of you passing through the modern-day Penn Station — which does have air conditioning (and is quite safe) but is crowded ... due to the “death” of rail travel forecast in the early 60’s being (in the words of Mark Twain) “greatly exaggerated”— it seems more like a crowded subway station or bus terminal. As the emeritus Yale professor Vincent Scully, Jr. told the New York Times in 2012, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” 

Yet …. while there is not a way to bring back the old Penn Station (impossible in today’s world) … there is  a development to augment the existing Penn Station’s passenger capacity, in a more uplifting way above ground.

And it involves a close-by building (facing 8th Avenue) that was also designed by Charles McKim (of McKim, Mead & White) in 1912, and which also garnered landmark status in 1966: the General Post Office (GPO) which was completed in 1912 and in 1984 was renamed the James A. Farley Post Office (after FDR’s Postmaster General, who doubled its size in 1934, now reaching 9th Avenue). 

And its facade has one of those transcendent sayings, which was not an official Post Office idea, but instead came from the history readings of one of McKim, Mead & White’s employees (from book 8, paragraph 98, of The Persian Wars by Herodotus, a Greek historian). During the wars between the Greeks and Persians (500-449 B.C.), the Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers who served with great fidelity:

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”

James A. Farley General Post Office facade, 8th Avenue

For the past few decades, the US Post Office has used only a fraction of the available space in this grand building …. and then-US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan floated the idea in the 1990’s of scaling-back the operations to what is needed for the present time (including retail sales, some administrative offices and Operation Santa Claus) … and reconstruct the rest of the building to accommodate a new passenger rail terminal?

After his death in 2003, the cause became a plan to call the new building Moynihan Station — and with some help from the Obama stimulus project, there will be a $1.6 billion redevelopment project, after all.

One change from the original concept (to close the current station and completely replace it) is to leave the present facility in operation (as the eastern end of Penn Station) with suburban New Jersey Transit trains maintaining their ticket operations there. Then, the rebuilt Farley building would be called Moynihan Train Hall— with Amtrak (as well as the suburban Long Island Railroad) moving its operations there, as the west end of Penn Station. A small portion of the Moynihan project is operating now (a western-end track access) with the full-fledged Train Hall currently scheduled to open in 2021.

Sight-unseen …. even if it can not recapture the grandeur that my father told me was the old Penn Station … perhaps it can capture a modern airiness and reduce the feeling of claustrophobia. And perhaps welcome visitors to New York in a more appealing way than it does now.      

Artist rendition: future Moynihan Train Hall annex to NYP 

Addendum: Here’s hoping the stars align for the urban rail project for Boston that former governor Mike Dukakis has championed, the North-South Rail Link— to connect South Station (the northern terminus of most Amtrak trains, plus suburban rail) to North Station (commuter trains, plus Amtrak service to Maine) adjacent to the Garden, home of the Boston Celtics and Bruins. 

Let’s close with a song from the original Fleetwood Mac (from their London debut in 1967) — with drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie the only remaining members — on founder Peter Green’s slow blues, First Train Home.

x xYouTube Video

Now, on to Top Comments:

From ontheleftcoast:

In the front-page story about about Trump's clueless commentary on grocery shopping— Dartagnan uncorked this gem… that had me chuckling.

And from Ed Tracey, your faithful correspondent this evening ........

In the diary by lynn47 about the thirty top secret security clearances given to Trumpster appointees (despite FBI objections) — Fe Bongolan cites an old TV show distress signal (I think) and Elwood Dowd notes the background of the guy who granted them.

TOP PHOTOS January 23rd, 2019 Next - enjoy jotter's wonderful *PictureQuilt™* below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. (NOTE: Any missing images in the Quilt were removed because (a) they were from an unapproved source that somehow snuck through in the comments, or (b) it was an image from the DailyKos Image Library which didn't have permissions set to allow others to use it.)

And lastly: yesterday's Top Mojo - mega-mojo to the intrepid mik ...... who rescued this feature from oblivion:

1)  I’m with Speaker Pelosi ! by eeff +288 2)  Nancy means it. by MTmofo +279 3)  Tipped for "Ocasiowned." by yojimbo +266 4)  Damn, she’s good. … by Jeff Y +204 5)  We can reuse one of his favorite chants ... … by FosterMomInCA +184 6)  There is not one single other Democrat who could … by RustyPatti +170 7)  She’s treating him like one of her grandchildren … by gf120581 +163 8)  Saw that. I think it’s safe to say that this is, … by CanyonWren +159 9)  Ha! … by CwV +154 10) In retrospect, I wonder if all the people that d … by lexnliv +150 11) She graciously gave him a way to accept that he  … by AnnoyedFrog +136 12) I’ve been saying this also for the last couple o … by lynnekz +131 13) Good. Now the fucker will have to ask Stephen Mi … by Dartagnan +126 14) [embed] by igualdad +125 15) [image] by LamontCranston +121 15) Which is why repubs are so afraid of her and tri … by jayden +121 17) Nancy Pelosi is my new spirit animal. She’s fier … by Another Mr Brown +116 18) The Huckabee woman doesn’t seem concerned that h … by gchaucer2 +115 18) It would be worth whatever it cost to send him t … by stevemb +115 20) there should also be a formal referral to DOJ an … by LRT +111 21) I like the idea of just turning off the lights a … by Ashaman +108 22) Nah. Denying Little Donnie this pulpit is a deat … by MindMatter +106 23) [image] by Rikon Snow +105 24) Thank you Speaker Pelosi! by Illinois Democrat +104 25) Anything I say will definitely get me banned fro … by IndieGuy +100 25) I expect we should get used to it. by Alden +100 27) We break Trump now, or he’s a King. by scarvegas +99 27) A Dem president once commented about them as fol … by RFK Lives +99 29) Given the threshold for prosecution has been met … by jqjacobs +98 29) Sarah came to mind right away on this one: … by CTstonewaller +98