Mighty Penn by Michael J

Mighty Penn by Michael J. Lewis The Pennsylvania Station in New York 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 Madison Square Garden 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 Pennsylvania Railroad 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 10 The New Criterion March 2018 Mighty Penn by Michael J. Lewis 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 midtown Manhattan. 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— The New Criterion March 2018 11 Mighty Penn by Michael J. Lewis 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 enormous 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.

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