Penn Station: Phoenix Rising or Icarus Fallen?

You may be familiar with the ancient Greek story of the Phoenix. A beautiful, colorful bird that rises from the ashes of its former self born anew. And you’ve probably heard of Icarus who used his beautiful wax wings to fly too close to the sun and came crashing to the earth drowned in the sea. Both of these stories seem to relate to the former, beautiful Penn Station. Once considered one of the most beautiful train stations in the world, it was destroyed and rather than rise from the ashes like a phoenix, something much uglier was created. Yet some New Yorkers hold out hope that someday a phoenix might rise and a beautiful train station might stand there again someday. This is the story of Penn Station.

You own a huge train station in New York City. But your business is hemorrhaging money. It’s the 1950s and people don’t ride trains as much as they used to. They drive on the new interstate highways, some even fly in planes. Why do you need a building for a train station when all the tracks are underground? It’s just a bunch of empty wasted space. You could make more money if you destroyed it and built a skyscraper and sports arena. Tear down the old to build something newer, better. Right?

Is newer always better? Does it matter how you arrive in a city? Or leave a city? Airports, do they really reflect the city you’re arriving in? If it weren’t for the ads would anything let you know you were in London or Rome or New York or Los Angeles. Airports are so far from the city anyway. A train station is in the city, used more for everyday transportation.

Why do we destroy beautiful things?

Buildings

Art

Relationships

They say many divorces are caused by money issues. And money issues are what led to the destruction of Penn Station. By the mid 1950s people weren’t riding trains as much as they used to. Why take a 24 hour train trip to Chicago when you can fly there in a couple of hours? There was an interstate highway system connecting the country. Why be stuck in a train with a bunch of mysterious strangers when you could be in the comfort and solitude of your own private car?

The Pennsylvania Railroad company just wasn’t as profitable as it once was. It would be more profitable to tear the building down, sell the air rights above it and build an office building and a stadium. Progress! Profit! That’s what matters.

Why do you even need a train station? What a bunch of empty space. You’ve got your tracks. They’re all underground anyway. You don’t need some big empty building. Seemed like a good idea at the time. That’s a phrase that’s never said about something good that happened. Always bad. No one ever made a million dollars and said “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” But hindsight is 20/20. Some New Yorkers fought to try to save Penn Station, but they obviously lost.

There is a photo from the demolition of the old Penn Station in the 1960s. It’s a construction sign telling people they can’t go down a certain hall and there’s a little cartoon of a construction worker standing in the middle stopping a man and woman running toward him on either side and the sign says “Sorry but… Close It We Must To Build Your New Station”

It’s such an interesting photo I think because we would never have a cute little construction sign like that today. It would just be a plain sign that says “Closed for construction.” No thought, just a plain basic NO. This was trying to be nice. “Sorry” You never see the words sorry anymore. It sort of speaks to a simpler time. Perhaps a friendlier time. But maybe I’m romanticizing. And it explains why it’s closing: To build your new station. Which makes it sound like a good idea. “Oh we’re getting a new station!” Everyone likes new things right? A new car, a new house, a new boyfriend or girlfriend. A new spouse. How exciting. My new station!

Destroy what’s old. Bring on the new. But what if you like what’s there? You want to keep it. Nope. It must be destroyed.

Build your new station. How misleading though because it wasn’t really a new station was it? There was no new Penn Station. Just a metal floor where the old building stood with a stadium and office building on top. Those were new. But there was no new station.

So on January first of 2021, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan train hall opened in the James Farley Post Office building. The building was originally built between 1911 and 1914. Designed by the same architects who designed the original Penn Station, McKim, Mead and White. Like Penn Station it was designed in a Beaux Arts style. Both buildings were of similar size. But the post office never got quite the same admiration as the train station because it was never quite as grand. In fact the building wasn’t originally even called the post office. Its first designation was just the Pennsylvania Terminal. In 1918 it was renamed the General Post Office Building. And in 1982 it was named after James Farley, who served as the 53rd Postmaster General of the United States from 1933-1940.

There is a plaque on a wall dedicated to him with an image of the man himself. He looks like he took his job very seriously. If you do a little research on him, Postmaster General seems to be one of the less interesting things he ever did. He actually led a rather interesting and influential life.

He was born in the hamlet of Grassy Point, New York, about an hour from New York City. He lived from 1888 to 1976. He helped Franklin Roosevelt become president. He was the head of Coca-Cola for 30 years and used his political influence to have it shipped to U.S. soldiers fighting in World War II as a “war priority item”. In 1933 he was the first high ranking government official to travel to Rome to meet with the pope.

At the same time as he was Postmaster General he was also the chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the New York State Democratic Committee. But according to Roosevelt’s secretary he did “little or nothing to the shaping of Administration policies”. She also said that he overestimated his popularity because “Jim made the mistake of thinking that the applause which greeted him at new post offices was an applause for him personally.”

He actually led a pretty impressive life. I haven’t even mentioned his famous ability to remember the names of people he met and facts about them, how he donated tickets to Yankees games for poor boys from New York City and surrounding areas, why there’s a Boxing Writers award for integrity named after him because he fought for the civil rights of African American boxers, or his role in the rise of stamp collecting.

For years there were plans to update Penn Station, but rather than update Penn Station, they updated the building next door to it, the post office. Though officials in charge have said this is only a first step and they do plan to update Penn Station as well. Currently only Amtrak trains which go across the country and Long Island Railroad trains will use the new train hall. Not New Jersey transit trains.

And it’s interesting that they call it a train hall and not a train station. Because it’s not really a train station it’s more like a big empty hall. It’s certainly nicer than the current Penn Station, but not as nice as Grand Central. But it’s also not a great entrance to New York City. How can architects compete with the original Penn Station? What they seem to have focussed on the most was the ceiling. It has metal rafters and arches with glass in between. Giving a sense of openness which is the opposite of the current Penn Station.

Why is it named after Daniel Patrick Moynihan? He was a United States Senator from New York. He is tied as the longest serving Senator from New York, 1977-2001. As a boy he shined shoes in the original Penn Station during the Great Depression. During his later years in Congress he worked to secure funding for the project which was just completed. Earlier in his career he worked in the Kennedy administration and wrote “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” which encouraged architects to think outside the box saying there doesn’t need to be any sort of official style for federal buildings. He wrote “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice versa. The government should be willing to pay some additional cost to avoid excessive uniformity in design of federal buildings.” So in the decades since then we got really interesting, innovative buildings like the San Francisco Federal Building and the United States Courthouse in Austin.

So it seems fitting that a hall with his name on it should consist of rather innovative architecture. Some people have criticized Moynihan train hall for being mediocre and boring. But the thing is the architects and designers were working within very specific parameters. The Farley Post Office is a landmarked building so it’s not like you could just tear it down and start over, (which is what some people want to do with Madison Square Garden and the current Penn Station). Besides, tearing down the original Penn Station is what so many are so against. The idea with the Moynihan Train Hall was to combine the old and the new.

New Yorkers love to complain. They’re never satisfied. They want new and daring, but want to keep the old and traditional. They want tall buildings, but not too close to Central Park and not too tall or too daring or too new. The Empire State Building was once new and daring. So was the Chrysler Building. A city needs to grow and change. It can’t be stagnant and stuck in the past, yet it needs to appreciate and hold onto the beauty and history past. Ugly mediocrity needs to be replaced by something innovative and new. But not every building is a masterpiece.

The famous architect Renzo Piano said of his profession: “It is an art that produces things that serve a purpose. But it is a socially dangerous art because it is an imposed art. You can put down a bad book, you can avoid listening to bad music, but you cannot miss the ugly tower block opposite your house.”

I think that explains why I’ve never liked graffiti. It serves no purpose, it is imposed on you and you cannot miss the ugly graffiti that you see. At least most architects are trying to make something beautiful. Putting some thought into what they are creating. Most graffiti is just ugly and imposed. Most graffiti taggers don’t care about trying to make something beautiful. They just make things uglier. It’s imposed ugliness. It’s trying to say that they are somehow important, when they’re not. It’s like abuse in a way.

The architect Santiago Calatrava has said “For me architecture is an art the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet fundamentally it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.”

To bring harmony. How many people are concerned with bringing harmony into the world? Creating something harmonious with the environment around them. Bringing something beautiful into the world. Inspiring others to look up.

I think in some ways the new Moynihan train hall does inspire us to look up at that steel latticework above our heads and see some semblance of sky above us. Is it as impressive as the original Penn Station? That’s an easy answer. No. But does it at least attempt to strike a harmonious balance between the old and the new? The answer is yes.

One can’t help but think of the destruction of the original World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And all the debate that flew around this city for years afterwards about what should be done with the area. To rebuild the towers exactly as they were? To leave the entire area completely devoid of development and make it just a memorial. To build something even taller than had been built before. Some said that would be too much of a target to future terrorists. Some said instead of two 110 floor towers, build four 50 floor buildings. Some said the era of massive tall skyscrapers was over. They would never be built in America again.

Well, I’m glad to say those people were wrong. I think that would have been to give in to terrorism. I’m happy to report that this city continues to build tall buildings. Very tall buildings. And some people, of course, complain. They say they’re too tall. They say they’re just for billionaires. But do those people forget the fear that gripped this city after 9/11? The thought that New York would never build tall buildings again seemed so sad. So defeatist.

As you probably know they built a new tall building at the World Trade Center as tall as the original twin towers, with a spire that rises even higher. And several others right next to it. In the years since September 11, 2001 many very tall buildings have been built in New York City. Some say COVID-19 is the end of tall office buildings. They say they won’t be built anymore. Back when tall office buildings like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were built office workers didn’t have the option to “work from home”. They had to come into the office.

There have been all sorts of articles written about whether or not people are more productive working from home or less productive when working from home or just as productive. And none of these “experts” can seem to agree. I don’t know. But maybe there is something about a group of people getting together in a space to work together. That’s how we humans evolved when we were just cavemen, hunting to survive. It was as groups we took down a wooly mammoth or a saber tooth tiger. It was as groups we helped each other farm and grow crops. We are not descended from some lone caveman sitting in his cave plotting how he will take down a mastodon all by himself.

Perhaps there is something to people being in an office together. Standing around the water cooler chatting, coming up with ideas. Perhaps there is something more ineffable than the cold hard data of whether people are more or less efficient working from home or working in an office. I don’t know. If you owned a company that did office work, would you rather pay money to rent office space on top of the money that you already pay them to work? Should you just look at the bottom line and think “Look at all this money I’m wasting on office space!”?

The drudgery of going into the office commuting on a crowded train or stuck in traffic in your car. And then the trek back. All those wasted hours. Or is being in that office somehow useful? Being with people. Feeling like you are part of something. Is that even a thing? How do you quantify that with facts and figures, spreadsheets and charts, numbers and graphs.

In August of 2020 it was announced that Facebook had leased all 730,000 square feet of the office space in the renovated Moynihan Train Hall. And the year before that it was announced that they would use 1.5 million square feet of office space at three huge new office buildings at the Hudson Yards in Manhattan’s far west side. Of course money is no object to Facebook, but for a company so obsessed with data there must be something about having their people work in an office. It must be worthwhile if they want so much office space. Surely all those people sitting at computers could do their jobs from home.

To this day huge office buildings are under construction and in development all around New York City. This is a city under constant change and growth. People have been complaining about how New York is changing for over a hundred years. Back in the late 1800s a writer for Harper’s monthly wrote “New York is notoriously the largest and least loved of any of our great cities. Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years altogether. A man born forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing of the New York he knew. If he chances to stumble on a few old houses not yet levelled he is fortunate. But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him as a city are gone.” In more recent years the writer Fran Lebowitz said “New York is a town where whenever they tear down a building they always put up an uglier building.”

So what does this mean? Should we never try to build anything new? Should everything look like that which came before? Or should we take risks? And risk that some people might hate that new building, but some people might love it. It’s those extreme choices that elicit extreme reactions. Probably worse than people hating your building would be people saying: “Meh” or not even noticing it at all.

Humans need to try to do new things, to grow, to change, to evolve. But even if the new Moynihan train station is considered boring and mediocre by some people at least it’s an attempt to improve the building, to change it, to evolve it. They’re trying. And just like that attempt, we, as humans should attempt to grow and change and improve. We might stumble, we might fall, but the important thing is that at least we try.

Penn Station: Phoenix Rising or Icarus Fallen?

A Little Island with a lot of Hope

To a bright future