Of Gods and Rats
I’d like to start this off with a prayer: a moment of reverent silence for anyone who’s ever entered Penn Station. It’s one thing if you’ve passed through to dodge an MSG crowd, willingly plunging back into Penn’s dungeonous depths like the dumbass (Plato) in Allegory of the Cave. It’s another if you’ve waited out an Amtrak delay in a restaurant with a name that sounds like a name your brain made up for a restaurant in a dream (“Kabooz”? “Chickpea”??). But it is a whole third thing if you’ve stood on blistered feet, landlocked by strangers, in the NJ Transit area, which is built like a rodeo corral for a reason, with a turtle shell of August backpack sweat, waiting for like two hours because you missed your train by a minute and the next six trains are only going to Secaucus and back. The New Jersey commuters are lowkey New York’s bravest soldiers.
The Metro North and LIRR apps politely announce your train’s track via a lock screen widget. The NJ Transit app was made in Power Point by a 14 year old, so you have to spend the aforementioned two hours staring at a Roku TV in person, waiting for your track to appear on an Excel sheet of 100 tracks, until you’re involuntarily swept to your track via stampede.
It wasn’t always this way. Penn Station’s grand, vaulted ceilings, inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla, once crested at 150 feet. (Now, in some parts of the station, they’re deadass 6 feet. Like actually. When they started with the Moynihan Train Hall nonsense they were like “do we think we should get rid of these 6’8” ceiling beams that people are calling ‘head knockers’? Or is that more of a Connecticut luxury?”) Penn’s original marble exterior was modeled after the Acropolis, the Greek building with the columns (I know they all have them, you know which one I mean). They were modest about it but Penn kinda blew the Acropolis out of the water by having a roof and not being all crumbly.
Lest we forget, when the original Penn Station opened in 1910, trains were only a century old. Not until 1831 was there a literal choo choo train that went from Harlem to Fidi (jealous). In 1904, just six years pre-Penn, the subway’s first riders put on their top hats and stood clear of the closing doors. Figuratively, of course—there were no doors, just a four-seater roller coaster car driven by THE MAYOR through a 9-mile Willy Wonka tunnel (but I too would risk it for a nickel).
Riding the train was still a whole event. Each train had its own iconic name like Orange Blossom Special or Cyclone Express or The Flamingo. (Guess where The Manhattan went? From Cleveland to Pittsburgh. Sure!) People wore ties and pearls because it was actually that fancy—on sleeper trains you could get a haircut, have a guy read you the baseball score, send and receive letters, and get your dry cleaning done. And they weren’t just nice to the tourists back then: even the riders of the first PATH trains got parcel check rooms and public telephones at every station, which I assume was sick. Every time I ride the PATH now I’m like “shit, what am I supposed to do with all my parcels?”
If you’ve ever wondered why the crowning architectural achievement this side of the Hudson (eat shit, Montauk Lighthouse) was named after the least cool of the 50 states (eat shit, Pennsylvania), the station was once a hub for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In the 1800s, Philadelphia was still hot and popular, coasting off of colonial clout boosters like “accepting of Quakers” and “shiny bell” and “threatened a second Boston Tea Party so hard the boats turned around.” But when the formerly port-less loser Midwest started building its own canals, Philly’s measly river port began to quake (pun intended) in its boots. Pennsylvania was like “I swear to God, if you guys don’t cut it out, we’re gonna get trains,” and boom! Pennsylvania Railroad.
In 1901, the PRR pulled a “new century, new me” and decided that they were over forcing their passengers to transfer to boats in New Jersey. They would build a train station actually inside New York City, on 33rd and 7th, in the seedy “Tenderloin District” (??), an area critics called “the modern Gomorrah” (still true). When throwing around name pitches, they didn’t feel the need to draw attention to the fact that the station was “grand” and “central,” because that would sound kind of conceited and insecure, so they graciously named it after the Railroad.
Within the decade, Penn was in business. The same 21 tracks and 11 platforms that remain today welcomed weary travelers with fresh haircuts, offered boat-free commutes to the seasick, and beckoned New Yorkers home. These weren’t trains on which one might sip a brown-bagged tall boy or stubbornly wait for Instagram Reels to buffer underground or fight a child for a one-seater. They were trains you’d carry a trunk on, wave at with a handkerchief, or walk on the roof of if you were a Wild West bandit (New York’s Wild West=New Jersey). And these locomotives’ noble home was would-be history, an Acropolis ruined on purpose. It was meant as a gift to the people, its waiting rooms ranking among the city’s largest public spaces. A warm, bright place with plenty of air to breathe, to catch up with one’s thoughts amidst the non-stop metropolis. These people had never seen a skyscraper, or if they made it to Coney Island, a roller coaster. Times Square and its electric billboards (then called “spectaculars”…cute) were just six years old. It was a lot to process.
But then the 50s came, and planes and highways became hot and popular. People decided it would be awesome to sit stationary in a smog-spitting Ford Thunderbird in the Holland Tunnel for three hours and then pay half their net worth for a parking spot. Better yet, they could fly from Philadelphia to New York and experience the wonders of Newark on the way (to be fair, at the time Newark Airport had a restaurant that served kebabs on flaming swords). Trains were no longer the latest engineering feat, no longer the Polar Express experience they once were. The subways had doors to stand clear of and were no longer driven by the mayor. And so, for the first time, Penn Station got, frankly, a little gross. They ran out of money to scrub all that marble and let the grime pile up. They crowded the main waiting room with a monstrosity of a ticket kiosk. They started covering the columns with plastic, a preservation tactic pioneered by grandmas’ couches, which sort of killed the je ne sais quoi.
At a certain point circa 1962, the City hard launched their proposed solution, “imagine if it was ugly and had basketball games.” Everyone was like “no but thanks for the offer.” But the City was serious, dead set on sacrificing this plastic-wrapped piece of history at the altar of modern marvels like AC and fluorescent lighting. (I’m not just saying that, they were actually pumped to advertise the fluorescent lighting.) Architects flocked to the city with rescue plans, people rallied in the streets, but it was no use.
A literal automobile manufacturer literally bought the station from Pennsylvania Railroad (for symbolism), and they knocked it down less ceremoniously than that part on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition when the guy would go sick with a hammer. The 22 eagle sculptures that once guarded the perimeter were scattered across the country—some of them were dumped in the Meadowlands swamp, which was a little excessive. Up went MSG and its cavernous cellar. Said Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”
At least Penn Station’s glow down was not in vain. People couldn’t believe they actually went through with it, and watching the first jackhammers breeze past the picketers in the morning rain, many were inspired to turn already-bubbling preservation efforts into Commissions and laws. Jackie O got on board and saved New York’s rudely obvious favorite child, Grand Central. And now, decades later, almost 30% of Manhattan’s buildings, plus some “scenic landmarks” like Central Park, are legally indestructible.
New Yorkers love the new Penn Station—the rat, if you will—the same way they love the pizza rat: it’s terrible and there’s nothing we can do about it. The City itself is literally incapable of fixing this tragic mistake. They’re like “we’ll build a fancier terminal across the street and gaslight them about it? The Long Island side can have a Dos Toros? We’ll start selling canned Pinot Noir? And throw in a giant Duane Reade described in a Google review as ‘very sad’?” Like the rest of New York, it’s haphazard and logicless. Zero planning went into any of it, especially the train schedule. But for some reason, we’re willing to stand sweating in the NJ Transit corral without complaint, the original granite visible through trodden linoleum.
