NY Observer: Vanity Project: Why Fancy Architecture Won’t Save Penn Station

Vanity Project: Why Fancy Architecture Won’t Save Penn Station
By Stephen Jacob Smith 8/13 7:40pm


Descending into Penn Station, it’s not hard to see why New York City’s civic fathers are so embarrassed by the nation’s busiest train station. The station sits bracketed by the Garment District and Chelsea, in the cheapest corner of Midtown, more than half a mile from the gleaming skyscrapers with triple-digit annual per-square-foot rents. The neighborhood (which used to be called the Tenderloin) may be classier than it was when the station was built 100 years ago, but that’s about the only thing that can be said for it.

Penn is clearly subservient to Madison Square Garden, which sits atop it. It was built in the 1960s, at a time when trains were thought to be on their way out, and it shows. The concourse is oppressively low-ceilinged and totally devoid of natural light, and the clear sightlines of the old Penn Station have been replaced with a warren of hallways with an almost airport-like inscrutability. The platforms are narrow and quick to fill up, leading some to call it unsafe—an exaggeration, but not by much.

Penn Station has been a thorn in the side of planners for decades, but in many ways, it’s a fittingly decrepit gateway to a city where politics mire the most minor of railway upgrades.

There are efforts afoot to fix the station, and the lines that run below it. Amtrak is pushing a plan ($800 million) for a new headhouse across Eighth Avenue as well as a new tunnel beneath the Hudson and a full-block station for New Jersey Transit across 31st Street ($15 billion). ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://observer.com/2013/08/vanity-project/