Photographs by Michael Cairl except where noted.
Today the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall opened across 8 Avenue from the superblock occupied by from Pennsylvania Station and, atop it, Madison Square Garden and office and retail spaces. So much has been written about the original Penn Station that I won’t repeat it here. Instead, read “The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station” by Lorraine Diehl, and watch “American Experience: The Rise and Fall of Penn Station,” available online. (Incidentally, one of the people interviewed, the renowned tunnel engineer Vincent Tirolo, has been a co-worker of mine and lives a few blocks away.) Moynihan station is named for the four-term U.S. Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had long championed building a grand train station inside the James A. Farley General Post Office, a Beaux Arts building across 8th Avenue from Penn Station. Moynihan Station is excellent in its own right but a bit of historical context is in order for a prooer appreciation.
The original Penn Station opened in 1910 as the station in Manhattan the Pennsylvania Railroad had sought for so long. Until then the only railroad that had a terminal in Manhattan was the Pennsy’s arch-rival, the New York Central, at Grand Central Terminal. Other railroads terminated on the west shore of the Hudson River in Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken; passengers completed their journeys by railroad-owned ferries or, from 1908, on the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (today’s PATH). Penn Station was designed as a station for intercity trains and Long Island Rail Road suburban trains.
Clockwise from top left: Penn Station looking west from 7 Avenue in 1910, the arcade leading from 7 Avenue in 1911, the stairway from the arcade to the main waiting room in 1911, the main waiting room in 1911, the train concourse and platforms in 1910, the train concourse around 1950. All photos from The New-York Historical Society courtesy of mashable.com.
The post-World War II decline in passenger rail travel and the glut of rail lines in a deindustrializing Northeast led the Pennsylvania Railroad to monetize what assets it could, and in 1962 announced that Penn Station would be demolished in favor of today’s underground station, a new Madison Square Garden, and an office tower. The New York Times’ architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, called this “a monumental act of vandalism” but it happened anyway. The destruction of Penn Station helped give rise to the historic preservation movement in the United States, and I have long thought that Penn Station died so Grand Central could live.
Intercity rail travel, at least in the Northeast, has come back to life under Amtrak, and the Long Island Rail Road and the other Penn Station tenant, New Jersey Transit, saw record ridership prior to the pandemic. The current Penn Station has been a dingy, confusing, poorly signed, seriously overcrowded warren of spaces used by its three railroads, a place to get into and out from as quickly as possible.
Moynihan Station allows dispersal of passengers over a greater area. It is meant to accommodate all Amtrak passengers and some Long Island Rail Road passengers. The existing facility will be primarily for commuters. The U.S. Postal Service remains on its historic 8 Avenue side of the building. The main part of the train hall occupies the former sorting hall of the Post Office, and commercial tenants, the biggest of which will be Facebook, will occupy the rest of the space.
I entered the station from the subway station at 34 Street and 8 Avenue. Wayfinding is pretty easy and it’s part of the design. Up a short ramp was the lower concourse, running the width of the station and providing access to tracks 5 through 21. (Tracks 1 through 4, used only by New Jersey Transit, are accessible only from the existing station.)
Left: Entrance from subway station. Right: Lower concourse.
A stairway and escalator lead from the lower concourse to the train hall, a transition from a low space to an open space reminiscent somewhat of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple (1906) in Oak Park, Illinois. What was once an open courtyard is now covered by an acre of steel and glass. There’s nothing fussy about the design; the openness, natural light, and masonry of the Post Office building all speak for themselves,
Clockwise from top left: The train hall looking south toward 31 Street, the train hall looking north toward 33 Street, the train hall looking west toward the Amtrak ticket office, one of the train gates in the train hall, one of the train gates in the lower concourse, obligatory selfie from the balcony on the 33 Street side.
Even the signage and departure boards were made appealing.
The New York Times has a great piece on the design and public art at Moynihan Station; go to https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/arts/design/penn-station-art-moynihan.html?searchResultPosition=1
Moynihan Station doesn’t address nearly all the problems of Pennsylvania Station: the layout of the station, train operations, and too little capacity for all the people using it. And while it’s convenient to the 8 Avenue Subway it’s a long schlep through the existing station from the 7 Avenue Subway. It gives a nod to the old Penn Station but doesn’t mimic it, and that’s a good thing. It will not be how Lorraine Diehl described the vast train concourse of the original Penn Station: “a room of blacks and whites and shadows, a room meant to be filled with grit and memories.” But it’s worthy in its own right, a good start to the transportation and planning problems besetting this area. It’’s the best public space, other than a park, to open in this city in a long time. I look forward to taking a train to or from here and thinking, as I cannot possibly do at the existing station, that I am someplace important and exciting. Go see it if you’re able.