The second original sin—the demolition of Penn Station—is still being talked and written about by those who care about old things and buildings, always the architecture columnists for the NYT. They've been sobbing over Penn Station ever since the wrecking balls took two years to remove the place in the mid-'60s and plop an office tower and Madison Square Garden where the architecture of the Roman Baths of Caracalla were recreated by the architects McKim, Mead and White. The father, son and Holy Ghost triumvirate.
The John Huston character, Noah Cross played by John Houston in the movie 'Chinatown' says, "politicians, public buildings and whores all gain respectability if they last long enough." Penn Station lasted, but not long enough.
Unless of course you're watching a movie that has recreated the upper level, via I guess CGI magic. Take the scene in the movie 'Motherless Brooklyn' where Lionel (Freakshow) takes the key to a locker in Penn Station to retrieve papers left by his murdered P.I. boss Frank Minna.
My mouth flew open. They've got Edward Norton striding through the upper level, going past 1950s travelers and their luggage, a serviceman in uniform kissing his sweetheart goodbye, track postings, all under the linty, slightly smoky air lit by the massive overhead skylights.
The steel arches are there. The clock is there, the one Alfred Eisenstadt took a photo of that appeared in Life magazine, benches and of course the lockers, something at was in train and bus stations until the early to mid '70s until they were removed because of attracting bombs. There were explosions. It's Brigadoon. The place is back for a brief, shining moment.
The CGI people created a scene so realistic that you can see a train heading west on the lower level platform.
It's always great when there is an old movie on Turner and they've used a scene from Penn Station The 'Seven Year Itch' is one of my favorites for many reasons, and one of them is the scene in Penn Station as Tom Ewell hurries to catch a train to Maine to catch up with his vacationing family while juggling a canoe oar and luggage though the station. Marilyn Monroe also makes the film memorable.
We were always going in and out of Penn on the LIRR railroad, taking the train on the Port Washington line to Murray Jill, a stop in Queens between Main Street Flushing and Broadway. They still use the station, despite its extremely short length, only able to accommodate four cars of ten car trains.
But the upstairs, that's where the Pennsylvania Railroad ran their long range trains to destinations all over the country. My mother and I tool the Broadway Limited, leaving Penn Station about 4:00 p.m. due to be in Chicago at 9:00 a.m., a 17 hour journey to the heartland to see her relatives. We did this a few times.
Trains became what my mother would rely on after swearing off flying. Initially, for the first reunion, we took a United Airlines plane destined for Chicago. These were four engine props that didn't fly above the weather. Going to Chicago the weather got so bad with rain and lightening that the plane put down in Toledo, Ohio. We were put up for the night in a hotel courtesy of United, brought back to the airport the next morning, and continued on to Chicago. It was one of those summer storms that hit the Midwest that dump flood conditions of rain. It was trains thereafter.
The last trip I took to Chicago by train was with my Uncle Vernon, my mother's brother. He too was afraid of airplanes, and preferred to drive, or take a train. Since he drove out to see us in New York using one of those services that you transport the car for someone else, he didn't have a car of his own.
It was January 1968 and I had already dropped out of my second college, so I was up for a bit of adventure. I followed him back to Illinois, taking the train from Penn Station. I don't think we slept a bit riding coach. Arlo Guthrie's 'City of New Orleans' has always reminded me of that trip. We didn't "pass the paper bag that held the bottle," but we did play lots of pinochle and gin rummy in the Club car.
On getting to Chicago we had to wait several hours for a connecting train to Pontiac, Illinois. We went to the movies to see 'Cool Hand Luke.' Vernon was working as a cook in a bar/restaurant in Odell, a spit of a farming town west of Chicago, right between Dwight and Pontiac. One of those town had a state prison. A local industry.
A waitress picked us up in Pontiac and brought us to Odell. It was near zero most of the time. The farmers came to the bar on their tractors for breakfast, or lunch. I helped my uncle in the kitchen. When I had enough of that I flew back to New York.
I always remember watching the Chicago news on TV telling everyone of the garbage strike in New York City. Another of Mayor Lindsay's famous municipal walkouts. During his first term in office the transit workers went out shutting the subways; the teachers went out; the police and firemen followed. Now Sanitation. This left mounds of garbage uncollected on city street for days. Luckily it was nearly as cold in New York as it was in the Midwest and the garbage didn't rot as fast.
Governor Rockefeller famously refused to call out the National guard to remove the garbage. He claimed the Guardsmen were not physically up to the job of tossing stuff into trucks. The strike was over within a week, before it became a true health crisis. Chalk another one up for the mayor.
As a kid I used to walk up from the family flower shop on 18th Street to Penn Station just to watch the destination signs change as the trains were leaving the station. Metal signs slid into the gate displays as trains departed for say, Cincinnati, or Richmond. Penn Station was my Mississippi, and trains were river boats, taking people on their adventures.
There was an arcade of stores outside that was about where 32nd Street is and the entrance to Madison Square Garden and 2 Penn Plaza are now. It looked like one of those arcades in London, stores inside. I was always one to go to libraries and book stores I bought the complete works of Sherlock Holmes in that Doubleday store in 1962. They had to order it for me. I still have it, but without the jacket; and it's water damaged. I bought a replacement years later. The book is a classic with all the short stories and the four novels. It is still in print.
My trips in to what I will always refer to as "The City" are very infrequent these days, made even more infrequent by the pandemic and the closing of entertainment and restaurant venues. Since barbers are now able to use their scissors in public I've taken to going back to my barber. Local haircuts left A LOT to be desired.
After coming in and out of Manhattan since I was 12, it's quite an adjustment not to go into the city nearly every day. But when I do, I always dovetail the trip with shopping, or medical appointments. No medical appointments yesterday, but there were other errands. And one of them was to take a look at the recently opened Moynihan Train Hall, the new access point for Amtrak trains that was carved out of the post office behind what would have been Penn Station, if it weren't now buried under Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden.
The General Post office on 8th Avenue, stretching from 31rd Street to 33rd Street was also designed by McKim, Mead and White. It was built when Penn Station was built in 1902. The frieze in front of the post office carries the complete motto of the postal service: NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE CARRIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR ROUNDS.
When I had the kids in the city I pointed out the wording to them and told them they had to make the building two blocks long just because of the length of the motto. However, if they used a smaller font they might have gotten away with a smaller building. I'm not sure if they believed me.
Of course the motto is no longer true. Don't expect any mail to be delivered if it's snowing out, and don't expect to get it fast unless you're paying a premium for what is billed as "priority" or "express" delivery. Times have changed.
Most people never realized that the Main Post Office was a quadrangle, with a vast open space in the middle. You could only realize that if you were in parts of the building, or looking at it from an overhead shot.
New York's U.S. Senator Patrick Moynihan knew this, and he proposed that the post office be put to use as a stand-in for the old Penn Station. Senator Moynihan was a four-term senator from 1977 to 2001, and passed away in 2003. He was always instrumental in getting federal funds for New York City and was a major factor in getting the money to restore and keep the Hell Gate Railroad bridge that took trains up to New England, Boston in particular.
His proposal was made sometime before the turn of the last century. It languished. But it was never forgotten. How could it? Any chance the critics got to advocate for a new train station to restore some grandeur to arriving in New York by train, they flung out there.
Senator Moynihan passed away in 2003, so he never even lived long enough to see the plans hit the drawing board. How almost odd that a project I kept reading about for over 20 years finally was beneath my feet and over my head.
At one point, the Garden wanted to move even further west and build a news sports arena. Perfect! Now's the chance. Oh-oh. Those plans stalled and the Garden spent perhaps $100 million dollars remodeling the arena with sky boxes and improved access to concessions and bathrooms. No new Penn Station.
Get rid of the Garden! Make them vacate the property. Be gone, infernal sports arena! Vamoose! The NYT was quite vocal about this. Fuhgetaboutit guys, it ain't happening.
Using the post office gained traction, so much so they actually planned and built what is now a new Amtrak station and a bit of a LIRR station in what was the center of the post office. After all, the post office was over the tracks that went west to New Jersey and all points south and east.
The post office long since didn't need the space, or even parts of the building, since major mail sorting operations had moved to other larger West Side facilities. Break ground.
And they did. And finished. And they opened the train "Hall" on January 1st this year, reportedly even under whatever the massive budget was. Good news all around. Great news all around. The writers gushed. I haven't read why it was named a "Hall." Likely to give it a European touch.
And so yesterday, I took the opportunity to see for myself. Impressive. The massive skylight keeps the place bright, something you become aware of as you approach it. I chose to enter from the West Concourse of the LIRR, the 8th Avenue end. There was a freshly opened escalator that moved me to the top. The escalator was working.
I knew I'd be able to gt to the Hall this way, unlike the fellow who wrote in th e WSJ that you couldn't access the station from the existing station. They guy's not from New York is all I could conclude. Of course you can. And of course you can from the 8th Avenue entrances that adjoin the massive staircase to the post office, because the front of the post office is still a post office. Need stamps. There's still a window for that. And other services.
The uncluttered vastness of the space of Moynihan Train Hall is immediately striking. No food vendors pushing pretzels and coffee. There was something off to the side, but I didn't explore that. I kept looking up, like a tourist.
The top walls of the ceiling say: MOYNIHAN TRAIN HALL on two sides, and E PLURIBUS UNUM ONE FROM MANY and EXCELSIOR EVER UPWARD, the U.S. and New York State mottos. My wife said they'll rename the station eventually. I told her no, they spent a lot of money carving that into the building.
Tracks 15/16 are LIRR tracks, and as such there is a LIRR ticket window. My guess is not many people are going to use this access to the tracks since you're nearly at 9th Avenue. But the West Side is changing. There are more businesses and residences there than ever. The whole place reminds me of Dulles Airport in 1964 when I took a TWA flight with an uncle and cousin to London. Dulles had just been carved out of the woods of Virginia and had about zero flight per day leaving or arriving there. That's certainly changed 50+ years later.
There weren't many people milling about. There were some wheelies headed for the Empire Service leaving for Albany-Rensselaer, but no real long range trains. Not sure there are any anymore. The furthest from New York City on the board was Roanoke, Virginia. There is a hanging clock.
The archway and skylight covering the whole expanse is impressive. Looking up you see that you're inside four walls of what was the post office. I don't think Thomas Wolfe would write about the space what he wrote about the old Penn Station, "few buildings are vast enough to told the sound of time," but then again, it's not the 1940s, and there are not vast numbers of people moving through the station, headed off to Army camps and relatives. Times change.
I didn't explore the bathrooms were, or look where the shops might be, or are going to be, or where you would buy a magazine or a newspaper or a NYC souvenir. I didn't go to the entrance that has the impressive upside down
chandelier-like skyline. I exited at 31st Street and 8th Avenue for the barber. But I'll be back with my camera and take photos.
I'm ten years retired now and with the pandemic I don't go into the city much these days. But I'm still connected. And for me it starts at Penn Station.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment