Old Metropolitan Museum of Art Reading Room Demolished Replaced 1950s
By Tense
When the Old Penn Station Was Demolished, New York Lost Its Faith
Today's version is humiliating and bewildering.
One of Penn Station'due south 22 famous eagles beingness removed from the building'southward 1 remaining facade. The statues ended up in far-flung places like the New Bailiwick of jersey Botanical Garden and on the roof of Cooper Spousal relationship. July 12, 1966. Credit... Jack Manning/The New York Times
In that location was a time when New York City had the gateway it deserved.
Demolished more than half a century ago, the quondam Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead & White was hardly the kickoff great building in boondocks to face up the wrecking ball. The Lenox Library by Richard Morris Hunt and the old Waldorf-Astoria past Henry Hardenbergh on Fifth Artery also came downwardly. For generations, New Yorkers embraced the mantra of change, assuming that what replaced a dearest building would probably be every bit good or improve.
The Frick mansion, by Carrère and Hastings, replaced the Lenox Library. The Empire State Edifice replaced the old Waldorf.
And so, a lot of bad Modern compages, amid other signs of postwar turn down, flipped the optimistic narrative.
When Penn Station became during the mid-1960s a subterranean rat'southward maze, the city seemed to be heading very definitely due south. The historic preservation motility, which rose from the vandalized station'south ashes, was born of a new pessimism.
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People today forget that the original station's structure, shortly afterwards the turn of the last century, acquired its own tumult. Several midtown blocks needed to be leveled, which meant displacing thousands of residents from the largely African-American community in what was once known as the Tenderloin district in Manhattan. The emptied lot, awaiting McKim's masterpiece, now looks almost comically vast in photographs.
The building that opened in 1910 — its concourse longer than the nave of St. Peter's in Rome, its flossy travertine quarried, like the ancient Colosseum'south, from Tivoli, its ceiling 138 feet high, its grand staircase nearly as broad as a basketball court — was a "beautiful Beaux Arts fortress," as the architect Vishaan Chakrabarti has put it.
Chiliad Central Final, at Park Avenue, by the architects Warren and Wetmore, created a bustling new urban hub intricately woven into the textile of the surrounding streets. By contrast, Penn Station had its fancy portes cochères for the railroad's well-heeled customers, and 84 huge, somber Doric columns, with 22 roosting eagles guarding the entrances.
Within and out, the building was meant to be uplifting and monumental — like the Parthenon on steroids — its train shed and waiting room a skylit symphony of almost overwhelming borough dignity, announcing the entrance to a modernistic city.
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With its swarming crowds and dust motes dancing in shafts of smoky lite, the station was catnip to midcentury photographers, filmmakers, artists and architects. Information technology was the architectural embodiment of New York'south vaulted ambition and open artillery.
Alas, by the Depression, the building had already begun to decline, and by the mid-1950s, the Pennsylvania Railroad was haemorrhage money — a victim of cars, planes and full general urban decline. Interstate highways and commercial air travel, buoyed by lavish regime subsidies, were taking a price on railroad train ridership. One time vivid and gleaming outside, the station, which price a fortune to maintain, was at present increasingly grimy, like the streets effectually information technology. Shops were shuttering where businessmen who missed the v:45 to Trenton used to pick upwardly chocolates for their wives.
Prototype
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On tiptop of which, as Ada Louise Huxtable, the old Times architecture critic, wrote in 1966: "Functionally, the station was considerably less than noble. The complexity and ambiguity of its train levels and entrances and exits were a constant frustration." Except for its glass-and-iron waiting room, she added, the station "was a better expression of ancient Rome than of 20th-century America."
So it wasn't altogether shocking when railroad executives offered the air rights for the holding for $50 million (nearly ten times that corporeality in today's dollars). New York could downsize its station, stick it underground, add a new sports arena and office tower on top and reboot itself for the rest of the century. To pragmatists, that sounded like progress.
In retrospect, entombed beneath Madison Square Garden and a commercial building too mediocre to rise even to the level of good or bad, the new Penn Station represented a city disdainful of its gloried architectural past.
Replacing the old station involved an technology feat: sliding a gigantic steel deck over the working tracks and platforms and then the station could still function even while the drum-shaped Garden rose above it.
Paradigm
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Epitome
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Surreal photographs bear witness crowds in the one-time waiting room seemingly oblivious to the wrecking crews dismembering the station effectually them. Moody black-and-white images of a half-demolished train shed bring to mind scenes of London during the Blitz or the crumbling ruins of ancient Babylon.
The sculpted eagles lowered by cranes from atop the giant columns look like flags at one-half-mast. Older salarymen with their hats on and younger ones without hats passed below banners hung from the columns promising a new era. A sign in one of the station'south undercover hallways read, "Close It We Must To Build Your New Station."
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Conceived to handle fewer than 200,000 passengers, the replacement Penn Station is today the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere, through which more 600,000 commuters pass each day — an experience equally humiliating and bewildering equally Grand Central remains inspiring and exalted.
Plans by Albany to paint lipstick on the pig, widening some corridors and extending the station into the erstwhile McKim-designed Mail service Office across 8th Avenue are only reminders of what was lost.
New Yorkers deserve a ameliorate gateway. Half a century later, the city is notwithstanding waiting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/nyregion/old-penn-station-pictures-new-york.html
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