Pennsylvania Station

I didn't grow up homeless, but it does seem I also grew up in Penn Station, going in and out of there so many times on either the LIRR or the Pennsylvania Railroad, headed to Chicago with my mother to see relatives. This was the 1950s, so I saw plenty of what everyone is still wringing their hands over and shedding their tears over, the old Penn Station.

The catalyst for this post was last night's telecast of one of those 'American Experience' shows on PBS, appropriately named 'The Rise and Fall of Penn Station.' The weeping continues. Guys and gals, it's gone.

It is rather amazing, but the show's narration makes no reference to Thomas Wolfe's poetic description of the station that he wrote in "You Can't Go Home Again." There is a fleeting reference to the place holding time, but treatment is not given to more of the text. I keep the text behind a print of Alfred Eisenstaedt's Life magazine photo of the clock and the main level.

...when the main character, George Webber, walks into Penn Station's Main Waiting Room: "The station, as he entered it, was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Great, slant beams of moted light fell ponderously athwart the station's floor, and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of that mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of the people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the langorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach. It was elemental, detached, indifferent to the lives of men...Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and...there was a superb fitness in the fact that one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station."

I can only think of two places the same can be said of now: the main reading room of the 5th Avenue branch of the New York Public Library, and Grand Central Terminal.

The first part of the show concentrates on the rail tunnels that needed to be built to connect Manhattan (an island) with New Jersey and Long Island's, Queens County. It was a huge engineering feat that was somewhat comparable to building the Panama Canal. The archival photos, and even motion pictures are a treasure. The work of the sandhogs was strenuous and basically one done with a hand held shovel.

The danger of the sandhog work is revealed when it is mentioned that a leak of the compressed air could suck a man right out of the tunnel, and send him geysering up to the surface of the water, and certain death. I distinctly remember William Bendix playing a sandhog, who works in a tunnel next to his son who has dropped out of engineering school to also be a sandhog. It was a 1956 TV Screen Director's Playhouse episode, and the Bendix character, Joe Redman, gets sucked out of the tunnel, but lives.

Perhaps, perhaps not, but I understood the Borden Chase story, 'High Air' (also a 1935 movie, 'Under Pressure') to be true. A sandhog did survive being sucked out. If so, it was based on the writer's experience of being a sandhog himself while working on the Holland Tunnel.

So the tunnels naturally came first. They are what fascinated me as a kid when we'd take the Broadway Limited to Chicago. My mother and I would get on at Murray Hill, a stop in Flushing on LIRR's Port Washington line, and take the train into Penn Station. From there, we'd make our 4 PM connection, with the expectancy of being in Chicago 17 hours later, around 9 AM the next day.

I'd always think that once I got on that train at Murray Hill I didn't have to again be outdoors myself (not in a train car) until we reached Chicago. And we weren't.

It was almost funny to hear during the telecast that there were those who were pushing the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, to build a hotel on top of Penn Station. Even in the early 1900s, Manhattan air space was valuable.

The hotel idea got nixed by the architect Charles McKim, because he pointed out they'd lose at least two tracks to the support columns that would be needed. The funny thing about this image is that eventually they did put something on top of where the old building was: Madison Square Garden, without losing any tracks.

The other funny thing is that I distinctly remember a New Yorker cartoon in 1968 that depicted the solution to the raging controversy of what was then Penn Central Railroad's (PRR and NY Central had merged) plans to tear down Grand Central Terminal and build an office tower over the tracks, much like what was done with Penn Station.

The caption to the cartoon (used with permission) was: "We think Marcel Breuer really has it licked now."

The battle over this was pitched. It wasn't equaled until the post-9/11 controversy over how to replace the World Trade Center. Marcel Breuer was the architect chosen by Penn Central to do the deed.

But 1968 saw Jacqueline Kennedy, then living in New York and having friends and knowing influential people. Very influential people. She wasn't in New York in the early part of the 60s, so she wasn't around to save the old Penn Station, but she and others weren't going to see another pile replaced in the same decade.

Penn Central lost the battle to do the tower, and later devolved into one of the greatest bankruptcies ever in 1970. The lawyers for that one likely built Boca Raton.

So, Grand Central Terminal at least was saved from the wrecking ball. John F. Kennedy Jr. would later joke that his mother did get a great deal of the credit for saving the place, but she really wasn't one known for her use of mass transit.

Given today's context and sensibilities, the destruction of Penn Station does seem like a crime against humanity. But at the time, the station was really dark and rundown. A maintenance deferred hunk of junk. The LIRR never looked good, and even today, after some renovation, still can't evoke anything but a midway of comfort and finger food joints.

Add to this the prospect of adding Madison Square Garden on top of the station, and you had a mouth-watering opportunity to bring a major sports arena in direct contact with mass transit, the LIRR, what is now Amtrak, and the subways. When it happened, I once again thought of my train rides as a boy. I could get on at Murray Hill, and didn't have to go outdoors to be in my season seats at Ranger games.

The current movers and shakers are trying to atone for Original Sin. There are touches of the old station visible at the Seventh Avenue end of the LIRR level; the New Jersey Transit station within the station, is clearly designed to evoke the old place, with its entrance from Seventh Avenue trying to make you think you're going to close your eyes and see the old station. But you're not going to, and if you close your eyes, you'll bump into someone with their head down looking at a cell phone. The girders and the arches at Jamaica Station evoke the old Penn Station.

There are vintage photos of the old station on the Amtrak level, and some original brass banisters with giant spheres at the top that were part of the original station that lead down to the tracks. It was years and years ago, and several years after my Chicago odysseys, when I looked down from the Amtrak level and saw a porter I remembered from the Broadway Limited leaning out one of the doors from a train that has just arrived from somewhere.

This porter was the same guy who took the 50 cent piece from me for a 25 cent pillow rental who never came back with my change. I started to think I'm the elephant who never forgets. I felt like calling him out on it, but I'd only get arrested. I guess he built his tip into my 50 cent piece. And by now, 25 cents wasn't worth much anyway.

The old Penn Station? I see it all the time.

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