Penn Station might get a radical overhaul. Or at least, it’s been proposed. A nonprofit advocacy group, Grand Penn Community Alliance, helmed by Alexandros Washburn, wants to restore the once-actually-nice-to-visit station. It’ll just require tearing down—moving, and then rebuilding—Madison Square Garden.
Once upon a time, Pennsylvania Station was considered a Beaux-Arts masterpiece. Opened in 1910, the original Penn Station was the “magnum opus” of design firm McKim, Mead, & White, whose “monumental architecture echoed the great spaces of Ancient Rome,” as the New York Historical puts it. Covering four whole city blocks, the colonnaded station was truly a marvel. (And did you know: Before it was built, getting between New Jersey and Manhattan meant a 20-minute ferry ride—when the weather was good.)
In the ensuing years, the city transformed, and with it the way people traveled. By 1962, it seemed like a good idea to put an entertainment arena where the above-ground station had been for just over 50 years. Enter Madison Square Garden, above, and Penn Station, as we know it now, underground.
The demolition of Penn Station was wildly controversial. In fact, states the New York Historical, the “demolition spurred the passage of the watershed 1965 New York Landmarks Law,” which helped save Penn’s “sister” terminal, the beloved Grand Central, “along with 30,000 other historic buildings around the city.”
So while most of us have likely forgotten that Penn Station preceded Madison Square Garden, the proposed reboot of the above-ground Penn is actually not so radical. Also, the station, like everything to do with trains and subways in New York, is overburdened. “We urgently need to create both new capacity and amenity in the next version of Penn Station,” Robert Yaro, the former president of the Regional Plan Association, told AMNewYork. “The Grand Penn Community Alliance plan does these things and also gets us a new MSG for the same cost as simply patching up the existing station and Garden.”
Washburn and the Grand Penn Community Alliance are making a case for cost efficiency. With the addition of a park, and a station that recaptures the stately stature of its predecessor, the price tag is about $6.3 billion, which, according to the alliance, would be “$1 billion less” than previous proposals by the state and Amtrak.
