The birth, life, and death of old Penn Station (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The birth, life, and death of old Penn Station (2017)

ny.curbed.com

59 pointsianrahman25 comments

They should've included photos of the current Penn Station in all its dilapidated strip mall glory, complete with indoor beggars left free to bug you for a dollar while you try to pay for a slice of pizza. I guess putting the two side-by-side would spell out too clearly the direction in which we're sliding.

I take it you haven't seen the current Penn Station. The 2020 renovation was quite nice.

What, Moynihan Hall, the separate structure across the street? Dilapidated Penn Station remains.

They renovated the main LIRR section as well. They raised the ceiling by 10 to 15 feet and added large LED skyboxes. All new retail spaces. Clear signage. It looks great, actually.

Yea, the LIRR section of Penn Station is really nice now.

I don't think I'd call it "really nice". It's better than it was.

Moynihan Hall is legitimately nice though, and as I understand it they're still working on the rest Penn. It's getting better!

This comment is seriously uniformed as one can clearly see by all the responses garnered, or a quick stop by the place.

> uniformed

I'm there in person on a weekly basis. Better to be experienced than informed.

I've been 1000s times over the last 25 years. Penn Station has never looked better over that time frame.

Architectural historian Vincent Scully on the replacement of the early 20th-centery Penn Station: “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”

Sad that NY didn't seem to know what they had - in London, UK, just about all old victorian stations are preserved, though there are some modern horrors such as Euston.

Last time I worked in the US (a while back now) I made a special trip to Grand Central - lovely.

Pictures of the main waiting room of the old Penn Station remind me a lot of Chicago's Union Station, which is very beautiful. I wish NYC still had the original Penn. I'm glad they still have Grand Central Terminal.

Chicago Union Station had its own "urban renewal" era mistake too. While the Great Hall remains, the old headhouse was a beautiful place that had better connections to what turned into the Blue Line. Torn down to sell the air rights for some soulless modern office tower, with travelers relegated to diesel soot filled, low ceiling rat mazes. It retains some of its dignity, but not all.

19th century train stations look cool but a train station is not a museum. Commuters want to go from A to B fast and safely.

A modern train station is a cross between airport terminal and subway- with a shopping mall attached to it.

I would counter that the "modern" Penn Station (at least prior to the recent projects) is worse at that "fast and safely" objective. It's much harder to navigate a maze of tunnels than to navigate a large, open station headhouse with far fewer obstacles between you and the track or exit you're trying to reach.

With the new Moynihan Train Hall, built in the same style as the original Penn Station, I can simply enter from the street and walk in a straight line to the escalator down to a specific track. No more maze of tunnels (getting to the subway is another matter).

Yeats mentions Penn Station in his Autobiographies--which are worth reading whether or not you care for NYC architecture.

So at the time of construction I imagine the techniques used to make a building look like some kind of classical architecture while actually being a facade on top of a steel skeleton must have been fairly new and experimental.

Was the maintenance story perhaps just not well thought through at design time?

It seems almost impossible to simultaneously design a building with recently developed construction techniques, to achieve such an impressive looking result, and to also nail any reasonable maintenance strategy as part of the design.

Lots of other stations built in the same style in the same period remain well-preserved and functional- Grand Central in the same city, opened 3 years later, being a prime example.

It was inspired by Baths of Caracalla in Rome, very impressive place to visit.

Lots of sad, hysteric hand-wringing around landmark preservation. I agree that Old Penn Station was definitely worth preserving and kept away from development, but how deep does the rabbit hole go? Churches [1], sure okay some of them, Gas Stations?![2] You can see how the conversation quickly gets ridiculous. Lets come up with a comprehensive list once, revisit the list every decade, then BURY that NIMBY excu..I mean enlightened argument for all other development.

[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/nyregion/west-park-presby...

[2]: https://ny.curbed.com/maps/gas-station-map-housing-nyc

first time i visited new penn station guy in a pink sweater walks up to me takes my photo leaves havent visited since lol

but the new design seemed like its stuck between two worlds like an EV trying to look like a cyber truck and a 1959 ferrari at the same time

NYC has destroyed more beautiful architecture than most cities have ever had

My god. Consider traveling more, or at least reading more. More likely true that the United States as a whole, in its history, has yet to create as much beautiful architecture as has already been destroyed the world-over.

Besides Penn Station and the notable handful of similar examples, I’m not sure NYC has a historically bad history of this.

This was a general theme in mid 20th Century passenger railroading, not just a NYC thing. For an occidental example, compare San Francisco's old 3rd & Townsend Southern Pacific depot to the modern 4th & King CalTrain station that replaced it:

http://www.snowcrest.net/photobob/3rdst1.html

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7764516,-122.3948237,0a,73.7...

The ugly truth is that railroad travel was too accessible for many people to tolerate and so it was killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Migration_(Africa...

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