Initially, this trip back to my mother's family in Illinois was started with a United Airlines flight from LaGuardia, sometime in the 50s. Four engine Constellation prop, if I've got that right. Or maybe a DC something or other. Most memorable flight I ever had.
It was summer, and there was so much rain that the plane couldn't get past Toledo, Ohio. Flying in those days was done through the weather, not above it. Ten thousand feet, that's it. All the passengers were put up in a hotel, courtesy of United, and we continued on the next morning. Think about that level of passenger care happening today!
Chicago was awash in flooding. One of their worst rains ever. My mother was completely sworn off flying after that. All aboard.
Chicago was the long distance train ride, leaving and arriving at the upper level of Penn Station. Then there were the LIRR trips into the city from Murray Hill, on the Port Washington line. Twenty-two minutes, and you're in the city.
Even as I got older and still used the LIRR to go into hockey games at the "new" Madison Square Garden I don't think it ever occurred to me to wonder why was it called Penn Station? We're in New York. What's up with that?
There has been no greater sin committed in NYC than the demolition of Penn Station in the 1960s. It took two years to knock the "Parthenon" down, but when it was finished, Madison Square Garden was built in the space over the tracks and an office building, 2 Penn Plaza. The Garden was opened in 1968 with a USO show starring Bob Hope. There have been a few renovations to the Garden, with the latest recently being completed to the tune of $780 million dollars. It is now the oldest arena in the NHL, with no need of needing anything more to be done to it
Last week I took in the Train Show at the Bronx Botanical Gardens with my daughter and her fiance. Nearly as soon as you enter you are faced with a replica of Pennsylvania Station, atop what looks like the Acropolis, with trains running underneath, just like they would have, and still of course do, but without the Parthenon on top.
I've never seen a replica of the station, and it is interesting to see it in 3-D, It truly looked like something left by by the Pharaohs, or the ancient Greeks. How odd to do the math and realize that the station was only in existence for 54 years, built in 1910, and demolished in 1964. Unless it is a military cemetery, there are plenty of cemeteries not filled up with 54 year-olds.
I explained to my future son-in-law, who grew up on Long Island and had little exposure to the City, that the incongruity of having a grand rail station named Pennsylvania in New York City was explained by the fact that the Pennsylvania Railroad built the station when they built the rail tunnels underneath the Hudson River.
Until that time, barges had to bring the coal across the river that was mined in Pennsylvania. The railroad had no direct rail link to Manhattan. That final link was made when the tunnels and the station were built. No more waterway transportation.
I showed Greg where the cabs used to enter the station, at the extreme right in the above photo. You can see the break n the sidewalk, where there is really a driveway. Imagine that being there with the number of people who are in that area today. Of course, if there was no Garden, there might be less people, but New York now never sleeps, and is always busy, at any hour.
When my father and I closed up the flower shop at 18th Street and 3rd Avenue my father was tired, having already been working all day at his first job in the Design Division at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Thus, he treated us to a cab ride to Penn Station to get our train home to Flushing, the Murray Hill stop.
This was generally at around 9:00 p.m. and Manhattan was already almost all in bed. The cab sped up Third Avenue, hung a left at 33rd Street, where Zwerling Brothers haberdashery was, with their name on the top of the awnings.
Going westbound didn't take long either then. We always hit the light at 7th Avenue and 33rd Street, but just across the street was Penn Station, where when the light turned green the cab sped across 7th and took careful aim to drive between the two right columns. I always thought we were going to hit the columns. There wasn't a great deal of space, but like a getaway driver fleeing a bank robbery, it wasn't the first day on the job for the cabby.
As soon as the columns were cleared you went down a fairly steep ramp toward what was nicknamed 'The Pit.' I can still create the sound in my head of the tires humming against the cobblestones and abruptly pulling up at the first drop-off point, the LIRR. The drop-off for the long-distance trains, what today would be Amtrak, was a little further into the The Pit. The cab could then exit at Eighth Avenue, and start all over again.
The cab fare generally metered out at under a dollar. My father was always holding change from the shop register to pay the fare, and add what I gathered was a 15 or 20¢ tip. The going rate then. At least I assume so, since a surly 'thank you' was never uttered.
The LIRR level then was never what I would call "nice." Fast food wasn't evident then, but there was a Nedicks, where cheap franks and an orange drink could be had. There was a men's clothing store, 'Fayman's Fashion,' a knock-off name of the chain 'Famous Fashion.' The two stores I loved the most were the Doubleday book store, and Hoffritz for Cutlery, with their display of Swiss Army knifes and kitchen knives.
The level was functional, as it is today, and actually a good bit nicer today. In that era, they actually closed the doors leading to the tracks when the train was ready to depart. Taking the 9:24 on Track 19? Well, unless you used the back staircases, and my father knew them all, and now of course so do I, there would be a uniformed conductor, who didn't say 'All Aboard' but who did close the door to the the main staircase when the train was due to depart. Imagine that today.
Upstairs were the long-distance trains, and this is where the architecture of the place was visible, the vaulted ceilings, the grand staircases, etc. But despite all the grandeur of the place, it was seedy in the 50s and 60s. Dimly lit and of course smoky, because smoking then was not prohibited, the upper level was drafty and to me, not greatly appealing. But I was just a kid, so what did I know? I did like to see the metal signs change that announced the destinations of the trains leaving below: Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond.
Calls to move the Garden continue, but with an estimate of $3.5 billion to create a version that would replicate the old Penn station, any chance that anyone is going to make the old Penn Station reappear in NYC is as good as infinitesimal. But that will never keep the architectural critics from writing about the need to do so.
The Golden Age of Rail travel is the segment of time that the old Penn station lives in. There was the movement of thousands of people who went through there during the war years. Servicemen who took a train to go to war. and servicemen who took a train to return home. My father would have been one such person headed to Oklahoma, Fort Sill, for basic training in 1942. Mt mother would have taken a train from Chicago to Nashville to the Thayer Hospital for her nursing duties. America didn't run on Dunkin' then; it ran on trains.
Thomas Wolfe wrote of Penn Station:
The station...was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Great, slanted beams of moted light fell ponderously athwart the station’s floor and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of the mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the languorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach... Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and...there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one that held it better than all the others should be a railroad station. Here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewell, here in a single instant one got the entire picture of human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, all were moving through the moments of their lives...but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.
With poetry like that, it is no wonder Penn Station keeps getting written about and the demolition regretted.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
Thanks for the history lesson.
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