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For the Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey, see Pennsylvania Station (Newark).
Pennsylvania Station is one of New York City's main railway stations. Commonly known as "Penn Station," it is located in the underground levels of Penn Plaza, an urban complex located at 32nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in Manhattan. It is used by a number of passenger rail services including Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road, MTA New York City Transit, and New Jersey Transit.
Penn Station is named for the Pennsylvania Railroad, its builder and original tenant. There could have been no Penn Station in New York City until the Pennsylvania Railroad's rails reached Manhattan. The 19th century PRR did not; it terminated across the Hudson River in Jersey City's Exchange Place terminal, where passengers bound for Manhattan boarded ferries for the final stretch of their journey. The rival New York Central Railroad's rails ran down Manhattan from the north, ending in its Grand Central Terminal right in the heart of midtown.
The Pennsylvania Railroad, unsatisfied with this state of affairs, considered bridging the Hudson (too expensive) or tunneling under it (too long to work with steam locomotives and too difficult to ventilate). The development of the electric locomotive and electrified railroad by the early 20th century provided a practicable solution to the latter problem.
On December 12, 1901, PRR president Alexander Cassatt announced the railroad's plan to enter New York City, to tunnel under the Hudson and to build a grand station on the West Side of Manhattan, south of Thirty-Fourth Street. The PRR had been secretly buying up the land in Manhattan and New Jersey that it needed for some time.
Two single-track tunnels were bored from the New Jersey side, and in addition four single-track tunnels were bored under the East River from Queens to Manhattan, linking the Long Island Rail Road, now under PRR control, to the new station. Sunnyside Yard in Queens would be the place where trains were maintained and assembled.
The current facility is substantially the remodelled underground remnant of a much grander structure built between 1905 and 1910. Designed by the famous architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, the original Pennsylvania Station of legend was an outstanding masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the architectural jewels of New York City. The above-ground portion of the original structure was demolished in the mid 1960s to make room for the current Penn Square/Madison Square Garden complex.
The original structure was a pink-granite exercise in a gigantic and sober colonnaded Doric order embodying the sophisticated integration of multiple functions and circulation of people and goods that is an under-appreciated achievement of the outwardly glamorous and occasionally pompous Beaux-Arts movement. McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Station combined frank glass-and-steel train sheds and a magnificently-proportioned concourse (illustration, right above) with a breath-taking monumental entrance to New York City, immortalized in films (see link below). From the street, twin carriageways, modelled after Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, led to the two railroads that the building served, the Pennsylvania and the Long Island Rail Road. The main waiting room, inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla, approximated the scale of St. Peter's nave in Rome, expressed here in a steel framework clad in travertine.
The destruction of the original structure, although justified as progressive in the trade at the time and largely ignored by non-professional Americans, nevertheless left a deep and lasting wound in the architectural consciousness of the city. A famous photograph of a smashed caryatid in the landfill of the Meadowlands struck a guilty chord. Pennsylvania Station's destruction is considered to have been the catalyst for the enactment of the city's first architectural preservation statutes. The sculpture on the building, including the angel in the landfill, was created by Adolph Alexander Weinman. One of the sculpted clock surrounds, whose figures were modeled using model Audrey Munson, still surives as the Eagle Scout Memorial Fountain in Kansas City, Missouri.
The above-ground components of this structure (the platforms are below street level) were demolished in 1964, without disrupting the essential day-to-day operations, to make way for present-day Madison Square Garden. The demolition of such a well-known landmark and its replacement by a mediocre slab of real estate was widely deplored and is often cited as a catalyst for the architectural preservation movement in the United States, and for laws restricting such demolition. Immediately after the demolition of this original Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal was declared a monument and protected by law. It also hurt the already arrogant reputation of master developer Robert Moses, whose plans for a Lower Manhattan Expressway were scrapped due to public protests and a rejection of the plan by the city government. In the longer run, the sense that something irreplaceable had been lost contributed to the erosion of confidence in Modernism itself and its sweeping forms of urban renewal, and thus helped clear the way for the rise of a Post-Modernist sensibility.
Across 8th Avenue from Penn Station sits the New York's General post Office, the James Farley Post Office. Under pressure from Sen.Daniel Patrick Moynihan, plans were publicized in 1999 to move the entrances and concourse of Penn Station into this building's outer shell. The process has not yet been started, however, and it remains unclear whether this will actually take place.
Passengers can also connect at Secaucus Junction to trains bound for Bergen County, New Jersey and Orange County, New York.
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