Last June a group of politicians dared New York’s beaten-down commuters to dream that their daily burden might one day be lightened and a historic wrong righted.
The governors of New York and New Jersey, the mayor of New York and sundry transit bosses gathered in a rare show of unity to announce a roughly $7bn overhaul of Pennsylvania Station, the western hemisphere’s busiest transit hub — and, quite possibly, its most despised.
“This time, we’re going to get it right,” Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, promised.
Fixing Penn Station has been an elusive dream ever since the original was demolished in 1963 in what many regard as the city’s greatest architectural crime. Previous attempts have been frustrated by political and bureaucratic rivalries, the sheer scale of the endeavour and bad timing.
As a consequence, visitors arriving on Manhattan’s east side experience the splendour of Grand Central Terminal while those on the west side endure a squalid, subterranean station buried beneath a sports arena — hardly a fitting gateway for one of the world’s great cities.
Designed for 200,000 daily riders, Penn Station is now clogged with three-times that many — more than LaGuardia, Newark and John F Kennedy airports combined. It is a warren of cramped, crowded passageways with no place to sit. As the architecture historian Vincent Scully famously said of Penn Station: “One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.” More succinctly, Hochul has called it “a hellhole”.
There are reasons why that might, at last, be rectified — not least the harmony among Hochul, her New Jersey counterpart, Phil Murphy, and the New York City mayor, Eric Adams. There is also money, thanks to a rail-friendly Democratic US president and his signature infrastructure bill. In the Senate, Chuck Schumer, another Democrat, presides over a slim majority, and also happens to be a New Yorker.
The determination to fix Penn Station has also been sharpened since the Covid pandemic by a realisation that New York City can no longer take for granted its ability to draw millions of workers each day from the wider region into its central business districts. For many of those commuters, what was once an obligation is increasingly an option.
It is a vital infrastructure project, to be sure. But Penn Station is also a colossal reminder of the city’s capacity to lose its way — and an opportunity to repair itself and prove it is still capable of doing big things. Passing that test feels all the more important at a time when the city’s customary confidence has been shaken by plagues of crime and homelessness, as well as the rise of remote working unleashed by the pandemic. The fear of decline is in the air.
While Miami builds, seemingly unfettered, New York is trapped in its own byzantine politics, personal rivalries and unresolved fights about wealth, urban planning and how much sway to afford its real estate barons. Will it renew itself, or will it fall backwards?
“This may be the one chance we have in the next 50 years to fix this,” Robert Yaro, the former president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning group dedicated to the New York metropolitan area, recently observed. A veteran New York lobbyist calls the project “too important to fail”.
A rabbit warren
The plan to rebuild the station is, in effect, three interlocking plans — each enormous and complex on its own. The first task is to repair 113-year-old tunnels beneath the Hudson River and augment them with a new one.
The existing tunnel was already in a state of disrepair before it was flooded with salt water during Hurricane Sandy. The tunnel is an infamous choke point in traffic coming into Penn Station from New Jersey, which is expected to provide a growing share of the city’s future workforce.
In January, president Joe Biden visited the area and announced a $292mn grant to begin work on a $16bn project, Gateway, that he called “one of the biggest, the most consequential projects in the country”.
It was a particularly sweet moment after years of frustration. In 2010, federal funding was in place and work had begun on an earlier iteration of the tunnel project. Then Chris Christie, newly elected as New Jersey’s Republican governor, abruptly killed it.
Christie cited cost overruns, burnishing his reputation as a fiscal conservative. Schumer called it “one of the worst decisions that any governor on either side of the Hudson has made”.
Donald Trump compounded the misery by stymying progress on Gateway during his term in office, and so repaying his fellow New Yorkers for their contempt. “For years he held this project up as a bargaining chip with Chuck Schumer,” one long-suffering backer recalls.
Alongside Gateway comes the $7bn plan to renovate the station, itself, and eventually expand it to the south in order to accommodate more traffic. The expansion would cost an estimated $13bn, and would involve condemning city blocks between 30th and 31st streets to build new tracks and platforms below.
The third piece is the redevelopment of the wider neighbourhood, which state officials described in a planning document as “substandard . . . insanitary . . . and economically stagnant”.
Much of the funding would come from the construction of 10 towers around the station on plots owned by a property developer, Vornado Realty Holdings. In lieu of tax payments, Vornado would instead contribute money towards the project.
When all is done, Hochul is promising to bring sunlight into the station, ease congestion, create acres of public space and revitalise a downtrodden neighbourhood with 1,800 new housing units and roughly 18mn square-feet of office space. The precise details, though, have yet to be sketched out.
It will be the work of years, and fiendishly complex to bring to fruition. There are the diverging interests of three separate rail lines that use Penn Station — not to mention the half-dozen subway lines that connect to it. Amtrak, the national rail service, owns the station but the commuter lines from New Jersey and Long Island account for most of the traffic.
Meanwhile, a welter of community groups and rail enthusiasts are already objecting, claiming that Hochul’s plan would bulldoze the neighbourhood and enrich developers while bequeathing bland office towers and forcing hundreds of small businesses and residents to relocate. For all that, they say, it would deliver only incremental improvements to the current station.
“They want to sell the heavens for abject mediocrity,” Samuel Turvey, a retired lawyer who leads a group called ReThink Penn Station NYC, complains, saying Hochul’s plan amounted to “spit-shining a rabbit warren”.
Earlier this month, Leroy Comrie, an influential state senator, appeared to agree, saying the governor’s developer-led plan was “dead on arrival” and urging her to revise it.
She has so far dug in her heels. “The governor’s proposal is the responsible, commuter-first plan that New Yorkers deserve,” a spokesperson said.
Where to put the Garden
ReThink and others are offering their own plans that feature more ambitious redesigns — but which would also require relocating Madison Square Garden, the arena that has squatted over the station since 1968.
Not only does it block natural light but its many supporting columns impede the walkways and train platforms below. That makes it harder to unload trains and slows traffic. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, another state senator, says the 20,000-seat arena is “a massive carbuncle on the face of the busiest transportation hub in the western hemisphere”.
Moving the carbuncle would cost an additional $8.5bn, according to state estimates. It would also require striking a deal with James Dolan, the irascible cable industry heir whose company owns the arena. Dolan has most recently demonstrated his agreeableness by using facial recognition technology to ban perceived foes from the Garden, where his Knicks and Rangers basketball and hockey teams play.
There have been attempts to move the Garden before. In 2006, at the behest of then-governor Eliot Spitzer, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti hatched a plan to move it to the historic Farley Post Office building just across Eighth Avenue. In spite of his reputation for intransigence, Dolan was amenable, participants say. But preservationists’ objected, Spitzer was ousted after a prostitution scandal, the 2008 financial crisis erupted, and the effort died.
Farley has since been converted to the recently opened Moynihan Train Hall and offices for Facebook. While Moynihan’s design has won rave reviews, it serves relatively few passengers, and took more than 20 years to complete. Dolan, meanwhile, has since spent $1bn to renovate the Garden.
At a public forum in January, Chakrabarti offered an updated version of his plan — this time moving the arena across the street to the old Hotel Pennsylvania, which Vornado is in the midst of demolishing. He would then reclad the Garden’s cylindrical superstructure in glass. A rival architectural plan for the station envisions a park, and another, backed by ReThink, involves a remodelling in the Beaux-Arts style of the original.
Supporters of such plans are hoping that a July deadline to renew a 10-year operating permit for the Garden could be a means to evict Dolan. Deepening their fury is the fact that the Garden does not pay city property taxes — an estimated $43mn a year — thanks to a sweetheart 1982 agreement to keep Dolan from moving his teams to New Jersey.
At a series of recent community board meetings it was hard to tell whom locals loathed more: Dolan or the Garden. One woman, Pamela Wolff, president of a group called Save Chelsea, said the Garden’s “throwaway aesthetic symbolises the low expectations of the era in which it was built” and pleaded with board members to “stop babying this arrogant billionaire”.
A spokesperson for Dolan’s MSG Entertainment replies: “If there was a realistic plan presented to us, that was centrally-located, in close proximity to mass transit, and that addressed the $8.5bn in public funding . . . it would cost to move the Garden, we would of course listen — but this just hasn’t happened.”
More challenging than Dolan may be the rise of remote-working. Only about half of New Yorkers are back in the office on a given day, according to data from Kastle Systems, leading to an equivalent drop in commuter rail traffic. That has prompted questions about whether there is still a need to spend billions of dollars on new tunnels and a station.
The Regional Plan Association believes there is. Even in its most pessimistic scenario for office attendance and economic growth, it forecasts that on some weekdays train traffic will return to pre-pandemic levels of crowding by the 2030s and exceed that by the 2040s.
In the meantime, though, remote working has upset the funding model for the project. Vornado’s shares have fallen by more than half over the past year as investors now question the demand for office space. On a recent earnings call, Steven Roth, Vornado’s chief executive, acknowledged that a new office building could not be financed in the current environment — let alone 10 of them.
Most real estate executives are convinced that there will eventually be demand for what Vornado is contemplating: ultra-modern and energy efficient towers, situated at a transit hub. Roth has been assembling his holdings around the station since the late 1990s, and those who know him say it would be foolish to expect him to walk away. “He’s a very patient man,” one said.
Harder-to-quantify but no less a factor in deliberations is nostalgia for the old Penn Station. The collective outrage at its destruction was the genesis of the modern preservation movement in New York City. The sense of loss and civic guilt is still alive, and wafted through a community meeting in January where Lorraine Diehl, author of The Late Great Pennsylvania Station, spoke.
“I’ve been invited to talk about Penn Station, which means I’ve been invited to make you cry,” Diehl told the audience before launching into a lengthy reminiscence.
Some worry that activists, in trying to make amends, have become fixated on dreams of raising the dead. “The folks who are saying, ‘you have to move the Garden’, they want to start from scratch,” one urban planner complains, estimating that could set the effort back by 20 years. “This is the best time we’re ever going to have to get the federal commitment.”
Turvey disagrees, arguing that the true mistake would be to think too small about such a consequential project. “We’re not zealots,” he adds. “We’re not recommending a brick-by-brick recreation of the original Penn Station.”
Light at the end of the tunnel?
Designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1910, the original Penn Station was a Beaux Arts palace of pink granite and marble. Its general waiting room was 150-feet tall and modelled on the Roman baths at Caracalla.
By the 1960s, passenger rail travel was in decline, and the once-mighty Pennsylvania Railroad struggled to afford its maintenance. After its destruction, the city was left with a maze of underground corridors deprived by the Garden of natural light.
Signs are confusing and make it difficult to navigate, retail offerings are shabby, and exposed pipes and fluorescent lights are the norm. The pandemic worsened the situation, making Penn Station an ersatz shelter for the neighbourhood’s homeless. On a recent afternoon, as a Vornado executive was giving a tour, a man wearing nothing but a bin bag walked past.
“You can see all the contradictions of the city here,” says Nazih Richani, a political-science professor at Kean University, waiting for a train to New Jersey. A man was standing on nearby steps with his pants down, and his bottom exposed, occasionally grunting. The odour was powerful. “You have tens of people like that living in this station,” Richani says.
Millicent Ansley and Mary Ann D’Urso, who had come from Bloomfield, New Jersey to see the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, acknowledge the station’s warts but also express a strange appreciation for its workmanlike ability to serve so many people. They were sceptical that Vornado’s plans would help the community.
“It’s another neighbourhood that bites the dust,” Ansley says. “It’s another neighbourhood overtaken by money.”
Some opponents believe there is a way to increase capacity at Penn Station without condemning the neighbourhood. It is called “through-running”. That is, trains from competing lines would no longer stop at their current endpoints in and around Penn Station and then return to their origin — often half empty. Instead, they would continue through one cohesive and free-flowing regional system.
While there is growing acceptance that through-running would be beneficial, it is a matter of transit-engineering debate as to just how much. It would also require unprecedented co-operation between various rail fiefdoms.
As the debate around Penn has raged, something surprising has been happening at the station, itself: it is being spruced up.
The most dramatic change has come at the Long Island Rail Road Concourse, a grim central artery that runs the length of the station. Its width has nearly doubled and its ceiling has been raised. New and legible signs are appearing. There is also a soaring new glass canopy entrance to the station on Seventh Ave intended to make visitors feel less rodent-like.
One architect called it an “amuse bouche” for what Hochul’s plan would eventually deliver. As passengers see more such improvements over the course of this year, backers are hoping they will embrace them, and rally to her vision.
On a recent morning, Scott Schwartz, 51, was reviewing the progress at the concourse as workmen swarmed and air drills blared while, behind him, a desperate man was digging through a rubbish bin. Schwartz first passed through Penn Station in 1981 when he and his parents rode the train from Long Island to see Simon and Garfunkel’s concert in Central Park.
“The fact that they’ve done this — if you ask anyone from my generation, they’ll say it’s amazing,” he says. Would Penn Station ever match the grandeur of Grand Central — let alone the original, he was asked?
“It’s never going to be like that. We ruined that. We tore it down,” Schwartz says. “I think they’re trying to do the best they can.”
Visual journalism by Cleve Jones
