(In fact, the Pennsylvania Railroad originally considered putting a hotel on top of it.) Alternatively, or in conjunction, Beaux-Arts towers could be added to McKim’s design. Selling the air rights would make up for the lost square footage. Rebuilding Penn Station would require removing Madison Square Garden as well as Two Penn Plaza, an ugly 29-story skyscraper that sits on top of the depot. Furthermore, new computer and machining technology would allow the classical details to be constructed quickly and cost-effectively. It would of course incorporate the latest technology, and would be altered to suit the transportation needs of today, but the essentials of the concourses and exterior would remain. Cameron of Atelier & Co., has prepared a master plan showing that such a reconstruction is both practically and economically feasible. Based on the original drawings held in the archive of the New-York Historical Society, a team of architects and developers, spearheaded by the National Civic Art Society in conjunction with Richard W. There is, however, an alternative guaranteed to equal the grandeur and majesty of the original Penn Station-namely, rebuilding the original Penn Station. The renderings are suggestive, not final, plans, but they are indicative of the lack of majesty and monumentality we will almost surely get in any other design. And since Madison Square Garden will continue to squat on the station, it will be impossible to design a soaring hall. One scuttles in now like a rat.” The plan the governor released at the press conference replaces the rats with upscale shoppers. Majestic it is not.Īrchitectural historian Vince Scully famously said about the difference between the old and new Penn Station, “One entered the city like a god. The proposal is reminiscent of the (architecturally superior) shops at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, which are fronted by a glass curtain-wall. Lacking any artistry or ties to New York, the new design is one-part contemporary corporate office building, one-part high-end shopping mall. Unfortunately the architecture, like so much of what is built today, is banal and generic. There will also be other new entrances and interiors that consist of slick glass boxes. According to the architectural renderings, the renovations will include a sweeping glass curtain-wall entrance on Eighth Avenue. Although civic design advocates such as the Municipal Arts Society and Regional Plan Association hope that a renovated Penn Station would include moving the eyesore Madison Square Garden to a different site, in the Cuomo proposal the arena would remain where it is.Ĭuomo has given developers 90 days to submit proposals for the site. The two buildings would be called the Empire State Complex. To fix the many problems with the current station, the governor has called for a $3-billion public-private partnership that will extensively renovate the transportation depot, and connect it via tunnels to the new Amtrak Station to be built across Eighth Avenue in the old Farley Post Office (also designed by McKim, Mead & White). The widespread consensus is that the replacement of the original Penn Station by the current one was one of the great architectural and civic crimes of the 20th century. In an editorial at the time, the New York Times called it a “monumental act of vandalism,” an opinion seconded in more recent years by Michael Kimmelman, the paper’s present-day architecture critic. Cuomo noted that the original station had “majesty” and was “the grand and triumphant entrance that New York deserved.” A gift to the city from the privately owned railroad, it was an awe-inspiring public space that elevated the common man.Īlas, in 1963 the station was demolished. As magnificent as Grand Central Terminal, it was modelled on the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla, and possessed soaring 150-foot-tall vaulted ceilings clad in marble. He contrasted the current station, which sits beneath Madison Square Garden, with the one it replaced: a Beaux-Arts masterpiece designed by McKim, Mead & White, which opened in 1910.
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