HISTORY DEPT.

This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful
The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, believe it or not, Robert Caro is to blame.

By MARC J. DUNKELMAN

11/29/2019 08:01 AM EST

Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, is the author of “The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community.” The research in article was supported by a fellowship from NYU’s Marron Institute for Urban Management.

At the northeastern corner of the underground maze that doubles as the Western Hemisphere’s most heavily trafficked transit hub, two frantic streams of pedestrians converge. Commuters—more than 8,000 of them heading in and out, every hour, during the morning rush—enter New York’s Pennsylvania Station from the blocks surrounding Macy’s department store and go down a crowded set of escalators off 34th Street. After arriving at the basement level, they merge with the hordes that exit New York’s subway, roughly 27 million passengers entering and leaving this one station each year. Together, the two torrents then enter the “barrel corridor,” a cavelike hallway lined with drug stores, coffee shops and rundown delis hocking “big boys,” the canisters of cheap beer popular with construction workers heading home to Long Island.

In May 2017, near the end of an ordinary Wednesday morning rush hour, a sewer pipe set above the barrel corridor burst open. Within minutes, streams of excrement poured through the station’s tiled ceiling. Sludge spread from a shabby McDonald’s at one end of the corridor to the Long Island Railroad ticket windows farther down. Armed with mops and buckets, janitors placed rolling dumpsters beneath the heaviest streams, but they couldn’t contain the flood. Unwitting commuters, their eyes cast at the downpour, traipsed through the mess, tracking it in all directions. A stench permeated the whole complex.

Vile as the sewage waterfall may have been, it was far from the most dangerous crisis to confront Penn Station commuters that spring. Six weeks earlier, and again in April, trains derailed in the tunnels a level below, injuring several passengers, and forcing the three railroads serving the station to cancel or delay dozens of departures. Inspectors eventually traced the problem to rotten ties, the wooden slats placed between metal railroad tracks. Inspectors had warned of the decay the year before, but executives had chosen to defer the repairs for what they deemed pressing priorities elsewhere.

Penn Station is the second most heavily trafficked transit hub in the world, trailing only Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. The station serves more daily passengers than the region’s three huge airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark) combined. More people pass through Penn each weekday than live in the city of Baltimore. Anyone who has passed through Penn Station over the past half-century—or who passed through it this Thanksgiving weekend—knows that the nation’s busiest transit center is a national embarrassment, a hole in the ground where the food is ratty and the waiting rooms are sparse.

For more than a generation, New York’s most important gateway has been a grimy relic. Powerful figures in New York, Albany and Washington have plotted for more than three decades to redevelop the whole complex into a world-class facility. But time and again, their efforts have faltered. Today, after 30 years of talk, the station is poised for an upgrade, but the plans are less elaborate than the ones that were announced last decade. And even when the current work is complete, the station will require still more renovation just to be considered a modern facility.


The rush of Penn Station in 1951 (top) and 2017 (bottom). | John Rooney / Mary Altaffer / AP Photo
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The Trump era may not be the moment to extol the virtues of unchecked executive power. But Penn Station’s story suggests that, for those hoping to achieve traditionally progressive aims, America’s cultural aversion to power has gone too far. Far from running the risk that another Robert Moses might haphazardly destroy a vibrant neighborhood, New York has emerged as a place where even the most worthy projects are left for dead. And it’s not just New York. The poisonous tap water in Flint, Mich., illustrates how feckless government authority can be nearly as dangerous as an impregnable autocrat—and, as demonstrated by Trump’s surprise victory in Michigan in 2016, may lead frustrated voters to embrace one.
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For anyone convinced that government is an indispensable tool in the progressive mission to improve peoples’ lives, Penn Station is a monument to conservatism. If public officials can’t even clear the way for a serviceable facility at the nation’s busiest transit hub, why give them any more authority? “Medicare for All,” debt-free college and a clean-energy revolution all require government intervention. Who wants to hand more power to the people incapable of fixing the Western Hemisphere’s most heavily-trafficked transit hub? Better, some will conclude, to hand the reins to someone willing to whip an impossible bureaucracy into shape—someone, perhaps, like Donald Trump.

New York does not need another Robert Moses. But amid the avalanche of checks created since the 1960s, progressives need to revisit the impulse that spurred figures like Woodrow Wilson and Louis Brandeis to try to make government work. Public authority, in the end, isn’t good or bad—it’s a means to an end. No one should be allowed to bulldoze powerless communities with impunity. But government should be able to build a nice train station in less than three decades. To rebuild faith in the power of government to do good, responsible leaders need the power to pursue the public interest.

FILED UNDER: NEW YORK, HISTORY DEPT.