Conceived to handle fewer than 200,000 passengers, the replacement Penn Station is today the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere, through which more than 600,000 commuters pass each day — an experience as humiliating and bewildering as Grand Central remains inspiring and exalted. — The New York Times
NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman takes a look back at the triumphal arrival of the former Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead & White in 1910, its steady decline in the following decades, the consequential replacement with the current solution—a disappointing product of mid-century modernist pragmatism—followed by a call for a better gateway.
"When Penn Station became during the mid-1960s a subterranean rat’s maze, the city seemed to be heading very definitely south," Kimmelman writes. "The historic preservation movement, which rose from the vandalized station’s ashes, was born of a new pessimism."
3 Comments
I'm amazed that 600,000 passengers is such a problem for planners in a city as amazing as NY. Shinjuku station alone has 3.5 million passengers everyday here in Tokyo. I get lost all the time there but it's relatively orderly. Shibuya is much smoother with only 2.4 million passengers a day. Neither of these stations has anything like architecture going on sadly.
The amount of negligence that the failure to adapt to changing use represents is a more interesting story than what was done on the architecture side. Both failures were wilful.
Why does Kimmelman quote Bloomberg official Vishaan "Hudson Yards" Chakrabarti in every article? Do these two have some kind of quid pro quo relationship? After their joint misguided MSG-gutting proposal, I've lost respect for the NYT -- who has handed over editorial to a third-rate bureaucrat "architect" consultant.
The NYT cries again and again about Penn Station but they didn't learn the lesson of architecture -- it was a station designed by the best architects, not some politicians. Maybe they should stop trying to create more problems, call some real architects and find the obvious solution to Gateway and Penn Station that they keep missing.
Please build a historically correct exact reproduction of the old McKim, Meade, and White 1913 Penn Station.
Thank You,
Konrad A. Mark
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