Pennsylvania Station
New York City's current Penn Station is a transportation hub embedded within the street- and underground levels of Penn Square (of which the most familiar element is the current Madison Square Garden) spanning 33rd to 31st Streets and 7th to 8th Avenues in New York City. Built by the Pennsylvania Railroad, it is now used by a number of passenger rail services including Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road, MTA New York City Transit and New Jersey Transit.
The current facility is substantially the remodelled underground remnant of a much grander structure built between 1905 and 1910. Designed by the famous architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, the original Pennsylvania Station of legend was considered an outstanding masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the architecural jewels of New York City. The above-ground portion of the original structure was demolished in the mid 1960s to make room for the current Penn Square/Madison Square Garden complex.
The original structure was a pink-granite exercise in a gigantic and sober colonnaded Doric order embodying the sophisticated integration of multiple functions and circulation of people and goods that is an under-appreciated achievement of the outwardly glamorous and occasionally pompous Beaux-Arts movement. McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Station combined glass-and-steel train sheds and concourse with a breath-taking monumental entrance to New York City, immortalized in films (see link below). Twin carriageways, modelled after Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, led to the two railroads that the building served, the Pennsylvania and the Long Island Rail Road. The main waiting room, inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla, approximated the scale of St. Peter's nave in Rome, expressed here in a steel framework clad in travertine.
The destruction of the original structure, although justified as progressive in the trade at the time and largely ignored by non-professional Americans, nevertheless left a deep and lasting wound in the architectural consciousness of the city. A famous photograph of a smashed caryatid in the landfill of the Meadowlands struck a guilty chord. Pennsylvania Station's destruction is considered to have been the catalyst for the enactment of the city's first architectural preservation statutes.
Enabling
There could have been no Penn Station in New York City until the Pennsylvania Railroad's rails reached Manhattan. The 19th Century PRR did not; it terminated across the Hudson River in Jersey City's Exchange Place terminal, where passengers bound for Manhattan boarded ferries for the final stretch of their journey. The rival New York Central Railroad's rails ran down Manhattan from the north, ending in its Grand Central Terminal right in the heart of midtown.
The Pennsylvania Railroad, unsatisfied with this state of affairs, considered bridging the Hudson (too expensive) or tunneling under it (too long to work with steam locomotives and too difficult to ventilate). The development of the electric locomotive and electrified railroad by the early 20th century provided a practicable solution to the latter problem.
On December 12, 1901, PRR president Alexander Cassatt announced the railroad's plan to enter New York City, to tunnel under the Hudson and to build a grand station on the West Side of Manhattan, south of Thirty-Fourth Street. The PRR had been secretly buying up the land in Manhattan and New Jersey that it needed for some time.
Two single-track tunnels were bored from the New Jersey side, and in addition four single-track tunnels were bored under the East River from Queens to Manhattan, linking the Long Island Rail Road, now under PRR control, to the new station. Sunnyside Yard in Queens would be the place where trains were maintained and assembled.
Destruction
The above-ground components of this structure (the platforms are below street level) were demolished in 1964, without disrupting the essential day-to-day operations, to make way for present-day Madison Square Garden. The demolition of such a well-known landmark and its replacement by a mediocre slab of real estate was widely deplored and is often cited as a catalyst for the architectural preservation movement in the United States, and for laws restricting such demolition. Immediately after the demolition of this original Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal was declared a monument and protected by law.
Across 8th Avenue from Penn Station sits the New York's General post Office, the James Farley Post Office. Under pressure from Sen.Daniel Patrick Moynihan, plans were publicized in 1999 to move the entrances and concourse of Penn Station into this building's outer shell. The process has not yet been started, however, and it remains unclear whether this will actually take place.
See also
External links
References
- Lorraine B.Diehl, The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station. Lexington, Massachusetts|Lexington, Stephen Greene Press, 1985 ISBN 0-8289-0603-3
Several other stations that were formerly stations on the Pennsylvania Railroad, including the main commuter rail station in Newark, New Jersey, also bear the name "Pennsylvania Station."
Referenced By
Acela | Acela Express | Baths of Caracalla | Birmingham New Street station | Colin Ferguson | East River | Grand Central Depot | Grand Central Station | Grand Central Terminal | History of New York City | History of the City of New York | LIRR | List of famous buildings, sites, and monuments in New York City | Long Island Rail Road | Long Island Railroad | Madison Square Garden | Maple Leaf | McKim, Mead, and White | McKim, Mead and White | Northeast Corridor | Rail station | Railroad station | Timeline of United States railway history | Train station | Union station | United States railway history | VIA Rail | VIA Rail Canada
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