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Penn Station: Fall From Grace

J.M. Syken

Course Outline

In this course, we will examine the historical background, development, construction, operation, demolition and replacement/commercial development of New York City’s Pennsylvania Station. This review will include the desire and need of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to bring its trains into Manhattan and provide a link with its subsidiary; the Long Island Railroad. In particular, the New York Improvement and Tunnel Extension – as conceived by PaRR president A.J. Cassatt, will be examined in depth and detail. This will include the tunnels under the Hudson/East River/s and Manhattan Island as well as the creation of the tangential New York Connecting Railroad, providing a rail link to New England via the Hell Gate Bridge.

The creation of the terminal building and yard facility will be the focus of attention. This includes the commission for a “Monumental Gateway” by the great architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White in the Beaux-Arts, neo-classical style. Both the exterior and interior design of the facility will be studied as will the decline of the station in the post-WWII era leading to its demolition in October 1963. The aftereffects of the station’s demise, including the rise of the historic preservation movement and ongoing plans for the expansion of Penn Station to the Farley Post Office Building (a.k.a. “Moynihan Station”) for use by Amtrak and New Jersey Transit as well as other initiatives will be of great interest.

This course includes a multiple-choice quiz at the end, which is designed to enhance the understanding of the course materials.

Learning Objective

At the conclusion of this course, the student will:

• Understand/appreciate the need/efforts of the PaRR to gain direct access to Manhattan Island and make connections with Long Island and New England;
• Understand/appreciate the New York Improvement and Tunnel Extension scheme as devised by PaRR president A.J. Cassatt;
• Understand/appreciate the role of the Terminal facility in the overall scheme;
• Understand/appreciate the architectural/engineering design of the west-side terminal station and its accompanying infrastructure;
• Understand/appreciate the decline of railroads in the post-WWII era and its economic, social and political effects on station facilities like Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal in NYC;
• Understand/appreciate the plans of the PaRR to demolish Penn Station and replace it with a modern underground station and commercial development aboveground;
• Understand/appreciate the efforts to prevent the destruction of Penn Station and the creation of the historic preservation movement in its aftermath;
• Understand/appreciate the Gateway and Penn Station South project/s and efforts to replace the underground station serving the LIRR with a more desirable facility; and
• Understand/appreciate the plans to use the Farley Post Office Building as a new station facility for Amtrak and New Jersey Transit to relieve overcrowding in Penn Station and regain some of what was lost when Penn Station was destroyed.

Intended Audience

This course is intended for architects, engineers and other design professionals.

Benefit to Attendees

The attendee/s will gain an intimate knowledge and insight into the rise and fall of one of the great train stations in the world: Pennsylvania Station New York.

Course Introduction

This course includes an in-depth PowerPoint presentation and the viewing of four short documentary films.

Course Content

In this course, you are required to view/study the following slideshow and the materials contained in the web pages:

Penn Station: Fall From Grace (printable handout in PDF, 16 MB, see Note A below for downloading instruction)

Penn Station: Fall From Grace (non-printable slideshow for screen-viewing only, 67 MB, see Note A below for downloading instruction)

Archival/Documentary Film:

TITLE: Penn Station (Scenes from Hollywood Films)
LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zasDjwQXXUA
DURATION: 06:17

TITLE: New York Documentary (Demolition of Penn Station)
LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-41Eh7fnjO0
DURATION: 06:58

TITLE: Secrets of Penn Station
LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqOXcYeXgz4
DURATION: 03:38

TITLE: Pennsylvania Station Documentary
LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YwZFm3RrFw
DURATION: 45:27

Note A: Please click on the above underlined hypertext to view, download or print the document for your study. Because of the large file size, we recommend that you first save the file to your computer by right-clicking the mouse and choosing "Save Target As ...", and then open the file in Adobe Acrobat Reader from your computer.

Course Summary

The demolition of New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, in the fall of 1963, still reverberates with a sense of loss and regret at the failure to prevent its ignoble demise. What made it worse yet was what took its place; an uninspired 29-story commercial office building and a drum-shaped arena – the fourth incarnation of Madison Square Garden. Below ground, it was a disaster; a low ceilinged, claustrophobic, confusing, overcrowded maze serving 600K passengers daily on three separate rail lines. One critic referred to the aesthetic design of the subterranean station that replaced the demolished Penn Station as “Men’s Room Modern.” If there was a bright side to the loss of Penn Station – McKim, Mead & White’s neo-classic masterpiece that reinterpreted Rome’s Baths of Caracalla as a train station’s voluminous Main Waiting Room, it was the prevention of a similar fate to its cross-town rival; Grand Central Terminal. The death sentence served on Penn Station gave life to a burgeoning historic preservation movement that was codified in law by the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). Tested all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the other great railroad station in New York City was spared the wrecker’s ball in 1978 because of what happened fifteen years earlier when the remains of the great edifice were unceremoniously dumped in the Secaucus swamplands. Like a Phoenix rising, a grand plan to relocate Amtrak and New Jersey Transit to the new, adjoining Moynihan Station reinvents MM&W’s 1913 classical Farley Post Office Building as a modern-day “Monumental Gateway” to the great city, just like the original did in 1910.

Related Links

For additional technical information related to this subject, please visit the following websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(New_York_City)

http://www.c-span.org/video/?309730-1/history-new-york-citys-penn-station
(Barry Lewis lecture on the history of Penn Station – video – 01:08:27)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJi2-I18kW4
(Film: Ready to Build: Hudson Tunnel Project - 02:53)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSz0I9_lAVU
(Film: Hudson Tunnel Project Animation - 02:13)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M26t7O79QWI
(Film: Hudson River Tunnel and North Jersey Rail Connection - 08:31)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_MvbTxIbyY
(Film: Fixing Penn Station and Hudson River Tunnels - 35:04)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewSjmhCD5ew
(Film: Hudson Yards: NYC's New District - 06:16)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YdhGpBaq4o
(Film: :Places - Lost in Time: Pennsylvania Station - 22:00)

Quiz

Once you finish studying the above course content, you need to take a quiz to obtain the PDH credits.