The Scrapbook knows there is little that real Americans find so tiresome as lifestyle complaints from East Coast elites who graze up and down the moneyed Acela corridor (“when the waiter finally brought the petits farcis provençaux the vegetables were criminally underdone!”). But allow us this one beef: Pennsylvania Station in New York is the ugliest, smelliest, least commodious railroad station in the known universe.
It was not always so. The original Penn Station, built in 1910, was a Beaux-Arts masterpiece designed by the great firm of McKim, Mead, and White. It was demolished 53 years later in what one critic called “an act of civic vandalism” and what we would call a typical spasm of 1960s tastelessness. Where once visitors to New York arrived in a skylit concourse and a vast marble waiting room awash in light from gilded windows three stories high, their great-great-grandchildren now must stoop through a gray, low-ceilinged maze awash in . . . we don’t want to know what it’s awash in.
Plans are under way to partially civilize and humanize the current eyesore. But some historians, architects, and preservationists rightly believe the plans don’t go far enough. They have formed a group called Rebuild Penn Station, and their goal is to, um, rebuild Penn Station. The original Penn Station.
They note that the original architectural drawings still exist and are still usable, and much of the granite stonework can be recovered from the New Jersey marshes where it was ignominiously dumped in 1963. They point to the renovated Grand Central Terminal, now one of the city’s premier tourist attractions, as evidence that a rebuilt architectural masterpiece could generate sufficient economic activity to partially offset the cost.
Fun fact: The entire Grand Central could fit in the original Penn Station’s waiting room.
Farfetched? You bet. Implausible? Maybe. Totally bonkers? Well, now, let’s not get carried away! Stranger things have happened (e.g., Al Franken is, at least as of this writing, a United States senator). If we must dream—and people do need to dream—we should dream big. The restoration of beauty where now there is only soul-crushing ugliness is a worthy goal, and The Scrapbook, for one, is ready to hop on board, if you’ll forgive the expression. Join us at www.RebuildPennStation.org.
