Mighty Penn by Michael J. Lewis

The Pennsylvania Station in out to be rather below the psychologically Is like some vast basilica of old acceptable minimum. That towers above the terror of the dark As bulwark and protection to the soul. To rectify this planning calamity, better late —Langston Hughes than never, a group has organized itself under the name Rebuild Penn Station, which is at Through it one entered the city like a god . . . . One once their mission statement and battle cry. scuttles in now like a rat. Rebuild Penn Station is currently con- —Vincent Scully ducting a campaign of public persuasion, making its case pragmatically rather than on It is the easiest thing in the world to convince the ground of nostalgia. With the planners someone that Penn Station should be rebuilt. Richard W. Cameron and James Venturi, it All it takes is a look at a photograph of the has undertaken a study showing how wider original station and then a look at Penn Sta- track platforms and additional escalators tion today. The subterranean warren huddled will improve circulation and eliminate the under is one of the desperate bottlenecks that make a train trip most disagreeable public spaces in New York, so unhappy. To recreate the vanished station or in any major Western city. The public usu- would not be cheap. Construction costs have ally becomes inured to bad design, through been estimated at $3 to $3.5 billion, which a combination of familiarity and the inability does not include the cost of replacing the to imagine something better, but the photo- buildings on the site. Madison Square Gar- graphs of Penn Station in all its Roman glory den would have to find a new home. And are a constant reminder that it does not have the twenty-nine-story slab of Two Penn Plaza to be this way. should also come down (although the station Incompetent design is everywhere, of could be built around it, if necessary). Yet course, but today’s Penn Station represents as Rebuild Penn Station likes to point out, something far worse. Its humid unpleasant- Santiago Calatrava’s flashy (and leaky) World ness seems too thoroughgoing and system- Trade Center Oculus cost $4 billion to build. atic to be accidental; something so uniformly It serves fifty thousand passengers daily; Penn nasty can only be the result of deliberate de- Station serves six hundred thousand. sign. And such was the case. When the reel- Rebuild Penn Station is an initiative of the ing tried to delay its National Civic Art Society, the Washington- inevitable bankruptcy in 1963 by selling off based nonprofit organization that was estab- its air rights, it lowered ceiling heights to the lished in 2002 to promote “beautiful, meaning- physically acceptable minimum—which turns ful civic design.” Under its president, Justin

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Shubow, the National Civic Art Society first engineer and the brother of the painter Mary made a name for itself in its opposition to Cassatt (a modernist in her own right). Cas- the National Eisenhower Memorial, Frank satt set the grand project in motion in 1901, Gehry’s “Eisen Curtain” (Shubow’s term for and began building two single-track tunnels the metal mesh screens that are its most promi- that would take trains under the Hudson and nent feature). While it could not prevent the directly into . Here would construction of Gehry’s memorial, its tena- be an enormous station, taking up a full four cious opposition helped mitigate some of its city blocks, from Seventh to Eighth Avenues, worst features. It became clear that there is a and from Thirty-first to Thirty-third Streets. great reservoir of untapped public support for The site was enormous—784 by 430 feet—and a dignified civic architecture, so long as one enormously expensive. For an architect it was makes a persuasive visual case. Not everyone the project of a lifetime, and Cassatt made an cares about monuments and memorials, of inspired choice. course, but everyone sooner or later deals with Up to this point, Cassatt had turned to train stations. And so there could hardly be a Furness for every one of his buildings, from better test case for the prospects of reviving a the railroad’s corporate headquarters (Phila- humane and gracious architecture than Penn delphia’s Broad Street Station) to his own Station. The challenge of Rebuild Penn Sta- house, church, and cricket club. These were tion is to make the public consciously aware cheerfully belligerent performances, with Fur- of what it already knows instinctively, that ness’s characteristic Victorian overstatement. something went catastrophically awry at Penn But Cassatt intuited that Penn Station was Station. And to understand why our current essentially a civic building, and that classical station is so bad, one must first understand dignity was the order of the day, not Victorian why the original Penn Station was so good. restlessness. He put the project in the hands of America’s most brilliant and accomplished Into the twentieth century, train passengers classicists, McKim, Mead & White. (As a con- could enter Manhattan only by means of solation prize, Furness was given the station in ferry. Northbound passengers detrained at Wilmington, Delaware, whose spirited brick Jersey City into the lobby of a ferry house and iron expressiveness demonstrates precisely and walked directly into the waiting ferryboat what Cassatt did not want for New York.) that would whisk them across the Hudson to McKim, Mead & White were all nominally a corresponding ferry house on Twenty-third the architects, but the building has nothing Street. The Pennsylvania Railroad did what of Stanford White’s sensual treatment of ma- it could to minimize the inconvenience. It terials and textures. It was entirely the work commissioned Frank Furness, Philadelphia’s of Charles F. McKim, whose classicism was imaginative Victorian architect, to outfit the of the severe Roman sort. McKim had stud- ferryboat interiors with mahogany seats, tile ied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the 1860s, floors, and brilliant electric lighting. (It was and his planning is that of the Ecole at its here that Furness first replaced the conven- very best. It is a hallmark of a fully resolved tional labels on the restroom doors, “Gentle- Beaux-Arts plan that one never hesitates for an men’s Cabin” and “Ladies’ Cabin,” with the instant and is always effortlessly aware of the modern terms “Men” and “Women.”) Yet all direction of movement and the waiting des- the festive decor could not conceal that the tination. At Penn Station, everything flowed ferry ride added an hour or so to the trip. with gracious axial logic. The pedestrian The solution was a tunnel under the Hud- entered on Seventh Avenue, moved along a son, but this was impossible so long as trains generously proportioned, shop-lined arcade, burned coal. By the turn of the century, elec- and entered the main waiting room with its trified trains were possible, and the president monumental vaulted ceiling. This was set at of the railroad instantly grasped the possibil- a right angle to the main axis—indicating ity. This was Alexander J. Cassatt, a trained that it was a place of repose, not movement—

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although the hurrying passenger could dash of it, and so the key architectural event that through it to the train concourse beyond. gave earlier stations their monumental urban Here the elaborate plaster coffering of the presence was absent. McKim’s challenge was vaulted ceiling vanished, exposing the steel to achieve this monumental urban presence frame beneath and letting light pour into the when the great engineering drama was be- train platforms below. low ground and out of sight. His imaginative Beaux-Arts architects were trained to make solution was to think of the station as both intelligent use of the cross axis, and this Penn a bridge and a gateway. In purely physical Station did with panache. To avoid chaos, ar- terms, the station was nothing more than riving and departing passengers used opposite “a monumental bridge over the tracks, with ends of the waiting room—arrivals at the north entrances to the streets on the main axis and and departures at the south. Taxi stands were all four sides,” arranged so as to create “the placed at either end, reached by descending greatest number of lines of circulation.” But ramps, crossed by pedestrian bridges. This in symbolic terms, it was a gateway, although made it possible to accommodate automobile one placed at the very center of the city, rather traffic easily, something that was not foreseen than at the periphery of the traditional city when the station was designed in 1904 but wall. McKim compared its function to the that was already of critical importance when Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, a dignified clas- the station opened in 1910. sical portico that also accommodated an enor- mous amount of daily traffic. This was the The most extraordinary feature of Penn Sta- inspiration for the colossal Seventh Avenue tion, however, was not its plan but its char- façade of Penn Station, McKim’s solemn essay acter. Most of the great urban train stations, in the dignified power of the Roman Doric. regardless of their architectural style, follow A gate at the periphery need only be a place the same conventional formula. They bring of passage; a gate in the center of a city, espe- their tracks into the city above grade, cross- cially one that one emerges into from below, ing streets by means of viaducts, and enter requires a grand and welcoming space. But the into that marvel of engineering known as a classical buildings that Beaux-Arts architects train shed. These were invariably of iron and studied were fiercely hierarchical; the axis of a glass—iron to prevent fire from sparks, and palace leads to a throne, the axis of a temple to glass to bring light through the smoky air. an altar. Public buildings in the modern sense In a terminus, the train shed was fronted by scarcely existed in the ancient world, which a monumental head house that served as its certainly had nothing quite like a train station formal face and was generally of considerable which directed scurrying travelers along differ- architectural pretension. It was in the nature ent paths. McKim found his model in the great of things that the shed was the work of an Baths of Caracalla, built in the third century engineer, thinking in terms of the maximum A.D. and still one of the most stupendous ruins achievable span, and the head house the work of Rome. Charles Moore, McKim’s assistant of an architect, thinking in terms of a pleasing and first biographer, describes the day when civic image. This was the basic typology of McKim decided to make it the basis of his the station, as perfected in the great terminals waiting room: of London and Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, and still surviving in the stations of That afternoon it was simply artistic impulse most larger European cities. that led him to hire the willing but astonished But at Penn Station there was no mighty workmen to pose among the ruins to give scale train shed, unrolling grandly behind the fa- and movement—movement, because in all his çade of a head house. The station rested above designing McKim ever had in his mind’s eye the tracks, which arrived below street level the people, men and especially well-gowned rather than above. The architecture was above women, who would sweep up and down his the engineering, so to speak, not in front broad staircases.

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In fact, McKim’s paraphrase of the Roman tions reflect the divided lines of responsibility bath is considerably larger than its prototype, and ownership between , the Port Au- so large that Grand Central Station might have thority, and the lessors of the buildings above fit inside it. When it opened, Penn Station was the station, as well as between the City and praised for this stupendously creative use of Ro- the State of New York. Although an equally man architecture—and half a century later, this vexing confusion over responsibility and same studious historicism was invoked to justify ownership afflicted the World Trade Center its demolition. It was, after all, just “a duplicate site, a satisfactory administrative structure of the hall of the old Baths of Caracalla.” was nevertheless eventually built. Another challenge for Rebuild Penn Sta- The demolition of Penn Station, which began tion is the ideology of historic preservation, in 1963 and took nearly three years, left intact a movement that is violently opposed to the its entire substructure—the train platforms, making of historic facsimiles, not only of a layout of the concourse, the tracks beneath. building but of any of its damaged or missing In fact, when entering on Seventh Avenue, parts. This doctrine is a recent one, historically one is still passing along McKim’s grand speaking. It is scarcely older than John Ruskin, axis and following the circulation pattern he whose Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) con- devised at the start of the last century. And tains a memorable tirade against architectural yet if the plan survives, it does so without restoration. those changes in proportion and scale, the sequence of compression and release, that Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing gave it decorum and grace, and that treated is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a the station’s users not as objects to be chan- model of a building as you may of a corpse, and neled efficiently through troughs, as in an your model may have the shell of the old walls abattoir, but as citizens, invested with dignity within it as your cast might have the skeleton, and self-respect. There can hardly be a more with what advantage I neither see nor care: but devastating rebuke to functionalism than the the old building is destroyed, and that more translation of McKim’s glorious sequence of totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into spaces into a mere two-dimensional diagram a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay. of paths of movement. Rebuild Penn Station is not alone in recog- Of course Ruskin was writing about a par- nizing the grievous problems in circulation ticular kind of restoration, the replacement and crumbling infrastructure at Penn Station. of decayed masonry, and the rebuilding of a The now defunct post office immediately be- wall in pristine modern masonry. It is stan- hind the station on Eighth Avenue, also by dard practice for a mason to recarve a badly McKim, Mead & White, is to be converted eroded stone by first tooling away the worn into use by Amtrak and the Long Island Rail surface and then cutting anew the moldings Road. In honor of Senator Daniel Patrick and details. Only the outer half-inch of ma- Moynihan, perhaps the last politician of note terial is lost, but for Ruskin this was to lose to show sustained interest in architecture, it everything. This outer surface was the part is to be named the Moynihan Train Hall. At of the building that bore the evidence of the the same time, a new concourse for Long work of the human hand, each visible chisel Island Rail Road users has been opened under mark and edge held the impression of living Eighth Avenue and further renovations are human labor—sometimes plodding, some- planned for the station’s two subway stations. times joyous, but always alive. And if it was All of these improvements are welcome and worn and scarred, so much the better, for it necessary, but they are scarcely adequate. testified all the more eloquently to the passage Only 20 percent of the station’s commuters of centuries. At a time in the Industrial Revo- will use it, and New Jersey Transit riders will lution when machine-tooled factory products scarcely be affected. These piecemeal interven- were displacing the work of artisans, Ruskin

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felt an exquisite agony at the effacing of the scarcely exist were it not for the destruction living surface of a building—like the flaying of that station in the first place. of a body. All that was left was inert matter. Yet while architectural reconstructions have Behind this was a cri de coeur against the ma- been frowned upon in this country, Europe has terialism of the modern world—and yet this been witness to a growing number of them. was itself a kind of inverted materialism, in Among the reborn buildings are Moscow’s Ca- which all that mattered was one component thedral of Christ the Savior, dynamited in 1931 of a building’s physical fabric, its material to make way for the Palace of the Soviets; St. skin. (Ruskin had little to say of those aspects John’s Cathedral in Warsaw, destroyed by the of a building that we regard as its essentials: Nazis in 1944; the Berlin Palace, condemned its plan and spaces.) as a symbol of Prussian militarism five years Ruskin’s tirade, entertaining as it is, has after the end of World War II—each of these been enormously destructive. Our modern has been scrupulously rebuilt, at great expense revulsion toward facsimiles is in large part and with deep research. a reaction to the restoration of Colonial In the end, the principal obstacle confront- Williamsburg, which began in the 1930s, ing Rebuild Penn Station is neither adminis- a comprehensive and well-intentioned re- trative nor financial but psychological. Our construction of an entire colonial town that society is reluctant to acknowledge that there resulted in the reproduction of numerous is any realm in which our predecessors were buildings, including the original Capitol, more capable or accomplished than we are. To which was lost to fire in the eighteenth architects it would be a confession of failure to century. This sort of restoration sought to admit that they are not in a position to create recreate vanished buildings with such im- something at least as beautiful and efficient as peccable accuracy that they could not easily Charles McKim did. Such a confession, like be distinguished from the original. In the all confessions, could be good for the soul. inevitable counter-reaction this became ta- boo. It became official orthodoxy, enforced by At present, Rebuild Penn Station is in need historic preservation legislation overseen by of articulate political supporters who can the Department of the Interior, that histori- make the case for decent civic architecture, cal facsimile be strictly forbidden, and that as Senator Moynihan once did. The moment historical building fabric, no matter how ruin- is auspicious. Madison Square Garden’s lease ous, must be lovingly preserved. (Perhaps the is set to run out in 2023, and its management best example of this is the moldering joists should be considering alternative sites at this of Philadelphia Independence Hall, which moment. And as various elements of the sur- have been encased in modern steel trusses rounding transit lines are renovated and made that carefully keep in place the useless but to sparkle, the contrast with the station itself sacrosanct timber, as if fragments of the True will become all the more unbearable. There Cross.) But while architectural elites might is also a satisfying irony to the timing: Irving object to the making of a facsimile, those of M. Felt, the developer who negotiated the us who are not architecturally ideological, and demolition of Penn Station in order to build that includes most people, do not. It would Madison Square Garden, said in 1962, “Fifty be the bitterest of ironies if the rebuilding of years from now, when it’s time for [Madison Pennsylvania Station were to be thwarted by Square Garden] to be torn down, there will the inflexible orthodoxy of the historic pres- be a new group of architects who will protest.” ervation movement, a movement that would Actually, no. There won’t be any.

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