When Manhattan’s original Pennsylvania Station was demolished in 1963, it marked the undignified end to one of America’s great public works, a monolithic Beaux Arts train terminal with Roman-style columns and a spacious central waiting area that at the time was the largest indoor space in the city.
In its place rose Madison Square Garden — home of NBA’s New York Knicks and NHL’s New York Rangers — while train commuters were forced underground into gloomy, claustrophobic, low-ceilinged corridors by the decidedly more utilitarian redesign completed in 1968.
“Through Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god,” the architectural historian Vincent Scully famously lamented. “One scuttles in now like a rat.”
But a dramatic new vision for the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere calls for a return to the old grandeur of the station, which was originally opened in 1910 and currently serves Amtrak, the national rail carrier that owns the terminal, as well as commuter rail lines to the surrounding suburbs and connections to the city’s vast subway system.
Renderings released Monday by Amtrak and Penn Transformation Partners, the design and development consortium picked for the project, feature a rectangular, stone facade lined with imposing columns along a grand entry way.
