During that decade of new interstate highways and commercial jets — all aided by various forms of public spending — the railroad’s managers became convinced that passenger train travel was in permanent decline. So in the mid-1950s, they decided to sell air rights to the eight acres between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 31st and 33rd Streets, where the costly-to-maintain old Penn Station stood.
“One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”
The asking price was about $50 million (equal to about $440 million today), and their decision led to the demolition of one of the crown jewels of New York’s civic and architectural heritage.
Completed in 1910, the original Penn Station was intended to symbolize not only its powerful corporate owner but also New York’s status as the most vital city in a nation that was becoming a political and economic superpower.
The august and spacious building was designed by the architectural firm McKim Mead & White, which had also reconfigured the White House for Theodore Roosevelt to make it more suitable for the leader of a world colossus. The terminal’s brash, white, eagle-crowned exterior with 84 granite Doric columns was based on the Acropolis, the Brandenburg Gate, St. Peter’s Basilica and the Bank of England. Its vast, lofty waiting hall was derived from the ancient Roman baths of Caracalla, Diocletian and Titus. .../...
Or, as the art historian Hilary Ballon wrote in 2002: “Penn Station did not make you feel comfortable; it made you feel important.”
The problem was that its existence was a gift to New York City and, because it was privately owned, one that could be taken back. As the parent railroad’s passenger traffic began plunging from the record highs of World War II, when G.I.s flowed through its arches, the station’s overlords cut spending for the maintenance of the once-gleaming station, and it assumed a grimy atmosphere of neglect. .../...
Compared with later campaigns to defend important structures, the effort to stop Penn Station’s destruction was pathetic. Modernist architects, including Philip Johnson and Robert Venturi, signed petitions denouncing the “vandalism” planned for the station, citing its status as a Beaux-Arts landmark, but an on-site protest march on Aug. 2, 1962, attracted no more than 200 people. .../...
The zoning permit for Madison Square Garden, which opened in 1968, expired in 2013. The New York City Council agreed to extend the permit for only 10 years, in hopes that a new arena could eventually be built on a different site. .../...
Unlike McKim’s monument, today’s Penn Station — where many visitors, both domestic and international, encounter New York City for the first time — certainly does not make you feel important. Comparing the vanished terminal with this tawdry replacement, the Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully once wrote, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”
Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, is the author of nine books and a contributor to NBC News and “PBS NewsHour.” Follow him on Twitter at @BeschlossDC.
A version of this article appears in print on January 4, 2015, on page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Place That Made Travelers Feel Important.
