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June 20, 1993, Page 002001 The New York Times Archives

Already, it is a landmark: that soaring arch of white steel, rising above granite walls of classical Beaux-Arts grandeur. Depicted in architect's renderings with sunlight streaming through its sparkling glass skin, the arch brings out the primal emotions aroused by the sight of a rainbow after a storm. It may be years before this vision materializes. The $315 million needed to build it is not yet in hand. But Amtrak's proposal to resurrect Pennsylvania Station from a pit beneath Madison Square Garden and enshrine it within the landmark general post office building across the street has aroused more anticipation than any civic project in years.

No wonder, for this project pushes some of the hottest buttons in architecture and urbanism today. Public space. Infrastructure. Mass transit. Regional planning. But the hottest button of all is one that touches off a painful memory: the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station station 30 years ago. The razing of this station, McKim, Mead & White's 1910 masterpiece of Beaux-Arts design, was one of the greatest traumas New York City ever suffered. Public reaction was profound, and in some ways beneficial. Historical preservation was transformed from a genteel pastime to a nationwide movement with political clout. Architects began to admit that the Modern movement was turning out to be less than a boon for cities. Above all, New Yorkers began to assert a proprietary interest in the city as their collective cultural heritage.

Still, New York has never completely recovered from the station's loss. How could it? Each day, more than 500,000 commuters -- 38 percent of Amtrak's total national ridership -- descend to the abyss Penn Station fell into. Even those with no memory of the old station can recognize the present one as a symbol of urban decline. Though the loss of the old Penn Station shocked the city to its senses, the idea persists that the shock may have come too late to save it.

With Amtrak's proposal, then, we're not dealing solely with the pragmatic world of glass and granite, tracks and timetables. We enter the realm of symbols and memories and the emotions they evoke. Do cities get a second chance? That is the fearsome question this project raises, and, of course, no building can turn back the clock. A new Penn Station won't bring the Normandie back to the harbor or the Lunts back to Broadway. It won't roll back the car and the highway, the forces chiefly responsible for undermining the old station and the old New York. But it could bring some important reconstructive forces into sharper focus.

Designed by the architectural firm Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, the proposed station is a tribute to the fact that grass-roots movements can triumph. The preservation movement did not flicker and die. It has become integral to the way cities do business. That is why the James A. Farley Building (as the soon-to-be-vacated post office is called) is still around today, and why it could one day have a public use worthy of its scale. Designed in 1918 by William Kendell of McKim, Mead & White, the Farley Building would not only receive Amtrak's passengers in style. It would also send the immensely cheering message that civic will can be exerted to effect, and not always in the wrong direction.

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The steel parabolic vault in the station's great hall (at 120 feet, it matches the height of the concourse at Grand Central Terminal) also sounds a note of victory. It is an arch raised to commemorate the triumph of mass transit over those who seem to think there's something un-American about it.

The modernity of the arch is apt. While the McKim, Mead & White building harks back to the past, the real promise of the proposed station is that it looks ahead toward the use of the mass transit as a tool for reshaping the metropolitan region. Amtrak's inter-city riders are only a small fraction of the travelers who use Penn Station. The great majority are local commuters on New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road. Many of them also regularly use the station's connecting subway lines. The opportunity now exists to make Penn Station a true regional hub, functionally and architecturally. The goal is not just to create a more comfortable environment but to attract more riders to mass transit and thereby increase public support for it.

THE PLAN ONLY PARTLY realizes this opportunity. The Regional Plan Association, which strongly endorses the new station, is calling for a more ambitious program that would join the region's seven rail systems in a network. Coupled with other regional strategies to make commuting more attractive -- like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's community development guidelines for areas served by New Jersey Transit -- the new Penn Station could become a means of redefining the relationship between the city center and the metropolitan region.

But those who hope that the new station will help New York regain its civic soul must reckon with a crucial difference between this project and the original station: the amount of space, and the degree of visibility, that the plan dedicates to retail shopping. In the post office building, roughly equal space would be set aside for retail and for circulation and waiting areas. The great hall itself would be ringed with two tiers of restaurants and shops, and the steel vault would be hung with giant electronic advertising panels facing into the waiting area.

This picture contrasts sharply with the vintage photographs of the original Penn Station and with the idea the station embodied. When people use words like majestic and civic splendor to describe the old station, they're not just talking about high ceilings and classical columns. They're evoking an ideal of public amenity: the idea that even in the citadel of private enterprise, some places will not be governed by the bottom line.

The original Penn Station was a monument to that ideal. To build it, Charles McKim talked the railroad out of its plan to build an enormous hotel in the air space over the station. As Lewis Mumford later observed, the lack of advertising in the station was "a point the European traveler often remarked on with surprise, as a pleasing contradiction in the land of the almighty dollar." Penn Station's glory, in other words, wasn't just what was there. It was what wasn't there.

But the glory had dimmed some years before the station was razed. In the mid-1950's, a modernization program equipped the station with shops, booths, television monitors, even cars on revolving drums. Mumford, predictably horrified, described the results as "a vast electronic jukebox," adding, "A West 42d Street garishness and tawdriness characterize the whole reconstruction."

What would Mumford make of the proposed station's advertising panels? The tiers of shops? "One entered the city like a God," the architectural historian Vincent Scully famously wrote of the original station. "One scuttles in now like a rat." Is the idea now that one should come browsing in like a shopper?

But before we mount Mumford's high horse and go charging along 33d Street to denounce commercial defilement, it's worth recalling that the proposed station began as a shopping expedition. Three years ago, Amtrak asked a group of private developers to submit proposals to upgrade Penn Station's retail operations. The plan to expand the station into the post office building across Eighth Avenue grew out of discussions with Penn Station Associates, the winning developer, which saw the chance to create something of urban as well as commercial value. The realistic choice, in other words, was not between a new Penn Station with retail shopping or one without it. The choice was between shopping with or without a new Penn Station.

In a sense, the developers and architects guided Amtrak toward McKim's ideal. If the result differs, that is largely because the railroad's fortunes have changed. In McKim's day, trains made a profit. Today, they are operated by the Government, with shaky political support. Until the Government is prepared to back all the nice talk about rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, Amtrak must turn to the private sector for support.

To grant this, however, is not to say that retail uses should have unlimited license. Indeed, the issue is not primarily how many stores there ought to be in train stations. It is how the partnership between the public and private sectors should be configured in the creation of public works. At a time when public works are once again on the table, this issue is paramount. Indeed, it is just as important today as architectural preservation was 30 years ago.

As with all public-private developments, the question with Amtrak's proposal is, where do you draw the line? The station's planners compare their project to other recently renovated monumental stations: Union Station in Washington and 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. But they are radically different models. In Philadelphia, the station has been beautifully restored without an increase in retail uses; it is still a station. Union Station, by contrast, is now a spectacularly beautiful shopping mall where travelers are apt to feel like second-class citizens. While the station's architecture has been preserved, its character has been lost.

The planned Penn Station would fall somewhere between these two models. The architects have conceived the steel vault as a visual screen that would partly veil the shops around the perimeter of the hall and put the visual focus on transportation. That is one reason they have brought the base of the arch straight down to the floor. This conspicuous display of engineering is designed to be the visual equivalent of "All aboard!" In the same spirit, the developers pledge to limit retail to what they call "noncommitted" shopping: purchases of less than $100.

These provisions are important, not only because they draw a line that is reasonable, given how the plan originated, but also because they reflect the recognition that there is such a line to draw. It's that recognition that has been so appallingly absent in recent years. Supporters of projects like Union Station often cite increased numbers of visitors as evidence of their success, but that measure does not take into account the qualities of place that have been obliterated in the process. How do you measure the submersion of a place like South Street Seaport beneath waves of merchandise?

More to the point, how do you retrieve the idea of a station from waves of disbelief in the future of trains? How can a building restore to civic dignity the sensations of arriving in a great city or decompressing from its tensions? It's easy to accommodate shoppers. But how can architecture honor those who share what Walter Benjamin called "the passion for waiting"?

Shops and signs can enhance these sensations. But there is a difference between citizens and consumers, and one of the major functions of public space is to keep that distinction clear. Market forces helped to destroy the old Penn Station, and now they have created the opportunity to build a new one.

It is up to the public sector to keep those pressures in check. If the line can be held here, the result will be more than a stunning new terminal. It will be a signal that public works are headed down the right track.

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