New York<\/a>\u00a0 Matt Nelson,
\nCC0, via Wikimedia Commons\u00a0<\/em><\/h6>\n<\/p>\n
\u2026 a mix of antihistoricist fashion and corporate self-interest saw the destruction of a remarkable number of terminal stations\u2026<\/p>\n
Open Culture<\/em> writes:<\/p>\nIn the New York of old, \u201cone entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.\u201d When he wrote those words, architectural historian Vincent Scully issued what has ended up as the definitive judgment of Pennsylvania Station. Or rather, of the Pennsylvania Stations: the majestic original building from 1910, as well as its utilitarian replacement that has stood in Midtown Manhattan since 1968. But then, the word \u201cstood\u201d doesn\u2019t quite apply to the latter, since it resides entirely underground, below Madison Square Garden. Over the years, New Yorkers have come more and more openly to resent the Penn Station they have and lament the Penn Station they lost, which architect Michael Wyetzner introduces to us…<\/p>\n
\u201cA conjectural reconstruction of Imperial Rome\u2019s Baths of Caracalla of 212\u2013216 AD,\u201d\u00a0writes\u00a0New York Review of Books\u00a0<\/em>architecture critic Martin Filler, the original Penn Station constituted \u201ca harmonious synthesis of two divergent and supposedly irreconcilable architectural approaches, the Classical and the industrial.\u201d<\/p>\nIt was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which in the late nineteenth century was \u201cthe country\u2019s largest business enterprise, with a budget second only to that of the federal government,\u201d\u00a0writes the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u2018s William Finnegan, and which at that time had a formidable engineering problem to solve: \u201cIts tracks ended, like those of every railroad approaching New York from the west, in New Jersey, on the banks of the Hudson River. In 1900, ninety million passengers were obliged to transfer to ferries to reach Manhattan.\u201d<\/p>\nTo run the Pennsylvania Railroad\u2019s tracks into the center of New York City required digging a set of tunnels under the Hudson, where, says one historian on\u00a0PBS\u2019\u00a0American Experience<\/em>\u00a0documentary on the rise and fall of Penn Station, \u201cnobody thought tunnels could be built. It\u2019s almost as though they were going to go to the moon.\u201d The technological achievement was matched by the aesthetic: \u201cIts main waiting room, paneled in Italian travertine, with fluted columns and coffered ceilings a hundred and fifty feet high, was the world\u2019s largest room,\u201d Finnegan writes. \u201cThe train shed was equally grand, with arching steel girders, staggered mezzanines, and glass-block floors that let sunlight through to the tracks. \u201d Like other major urban rail terminals of its era,\u00a0writes Tony Judt, Penn Station \u201cspoke directly and deliberately to the commercial ambitions and civic self-image of the modern metropolis.\u201d<\/p>\nBy the mid-twentieth-century, however, trains were facing aggressive competition from both the private car and the airplane, which displaced their stations from the center of modern life. \u201cBetween 1955 and 1975,\u201d Judt writes, \u201ca mix of antihistoricist fashion and corporate self-interest saw the destruction of a remarkable number of terminal stations.\u201d But prospects for rail of one kind or another in America have looked up in recent years, and \u201cwe are no longer embarrassed by the rococo or neo-Gothic or Beaux-Arts excesses of the great railway stations of the industrial age and can see such edifices instead as their designers and contemporaries saw them: as the cathedrals of their age.\u201d Hence, in New York, the preservation of Grand Central Station \u2014 as well as the bitter and protracted struggle (covered extensively in Finnegan\u2019s\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>piece) over whether and how to turn the unloved Penn Station into a cathedral of our age.<\/p>\nRead more and view the videos…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open Culture has reported on \u2018The Destruction of Penn Station: How New York City Lost Its Majestic Beaux-Arts Rail Terminal\u2019. image for illustration:\u00a0 New York\u00a0 Matt Nelson, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sector-newsblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36959"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36962,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36959\/revisions\/36962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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