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Save Penn Station
In praise of New York’s heavenly “hellhole”
By Thomas de Monchaux
New York City loves demolishing Pennsylvania Station so much that it keeps on doing it. The first demolition is still the most famous: the 1963–66 destruction of McKim, Mead & White’s 1910 sprawling Greco-Roman block-filler. But the threat continues to this day—not only to parts of the 1966 replacement, but to substantial and serendipitous remnants and complements of the original.
That replacement was developer/ architect Charles Luckman’s now unpopular design for the complex constituting of a commuter and intercity train station, a midsized office tower, and the Madison Square Garden arena. “One entered the city like a god,” goes the famous elegy by historian Vincent Scully, “one scuttles in now like a rat.” Presumably he meant that because the demolished Penn Station’s colonnaded halls and vaulted rooms, with their sixty-foot monumental Corinthian order, were based vaguely on the Baths of Caracalla, you could waft through it all as might one of those many irritable or implacable Roman deities—or at least like a Roman citizen spending a summer afternoon at the caldarium. (Never mind that, since the original Penn Station didn’t much provide dedicated circulation to the local subways, and since its main hall was displaced from its primary platforms in the interest of exterior visual presence on Seventh Avenue, there was always a measure of scuttling.)
Yet the rat—virally pizza-schlepping or otherwise—is the natural sigil and familiar of New York City: maritime, hungry, brave, ingenious, ambitious, unsentimental, disloyal, charismatic, sociable, adaptable, violence-capable, possessed of a nocturnal glamour and feral beauty. Compared with all that, what New Yorker would want to be a mere god of ancient Rome: languid, impulsive, callow, inhuman? God-wise, the demolition of Penn Station also answers to the received wisdom of a Christian martyrdom story: the old Penn Station had to die so that other distinguished ancient buildings might live. The fall of the wrecking ball was our Judas kiss. Our uncritically received gospel is that the city’s instant remorse at having done such a thing catalyzed the founding of its Landmarks Preservation Commission, generally understood to be the first of its kind, and—in parallel with the concurrent federal Historic Preservation Act of 1966—an institutional template for the late-mid-twentieth-century conservation movement in architecture and urbanism. More and more when I hear all that, I think: cool story, bro. It is a flattering and soothing and juvenile and puritanical and gratifyingly evangelical narrative: that only through an act of successful savagery and self-sabotage could a place or a people subsequently arrive at righteous rectitude. Conversely, embedded within the relentlessly expressed regret for destroying the old Penn Station may be also a perverse thrill or transgressive pride in having actually done it, in having proved our dangerous streak and our roguish immunity to refinement. By smashing our nice things and then hating ourselves for doing so, we get to have it both ways: to identify with the Barbarians as well as the Romans, with the rats as well as the gods.
Read more about Penn Station’s merits here.
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Editors-at-Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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