Be afraid, be very afraid, of “improvements” to Penn Station that would leave it little better than it is, while bleeding taxpayers and making commuters’ life hell for years on end.
Arguments to untangle Penn Station’s “maze” are exactly and alarmingly the same rationale as we heard for the MTA’s Fulton Center, the $1.4 billion boondoggle that’s a mere seven years behind schedule — and which wouldn’t have gotten even this far without a massive federal bailout.
“Give us a new Penn Station!” is the chorus of elected officials, urban planners and architects. The gloomy, overcrowded and confusing underground eyesore’s unworthy of a great metropolis, we’re told.
Move it into the Farley Post Office to become “Moynihan Station!” Evict Madison Square Garden from its roof so we can raise a cathedral for a new, golden age of railroading!
Or, in the ominously new pitch, don’t wait for that — create new entrances, plazas and concourses immediately. That way, a “talented architect could recapture much of the glory” of the 1910 original station demolished in 1963, says Bloomberg.com’s distinguished architectural critic James Russell.
But while the existing station undeniably stinks, dysfunctional Bronx courts pose a far graver threat to the metropolis’ future than does an overcrowded LIRR platform. Yet Penn Station’s supposedly unacceptable condition commands the lion’s share of public passion.
The New Penn Station Alliance, a group led by the Municipal Art Society and the Regional Plan Association and backed by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, is calling on the city not to renew MSG’s arena operating permit beyond 10 more years.
The MAS has tapped architects to “reimagine” the station if the Garden’s booted. And Russell, in a new argument likely to gain traction in influential circles, calls for not waiting until then.
Rather, he says, let’s sooner punch skylights in parts of the station roof which don’t lie beneath the Garden, and create a “single, broad, easily navigated concourse” to replace current ones “balkanized in separate mazelike fiefdoms on three levels.”
But, as Bob McManus delicately put it in these pages a few weeks ago, the magnificent old Penn Station “ain’t coming back.”
For an idea of how a station redesign might play out, look no farther than the Fulton Center mess: The new, domed structure looks swell from the outside. But it’s thanks entirely to an unexpected, $424 million handout from the Feds in 2009, a year after the MTA — having evicted scores of businesses and turned lower Broadway into a war zone — left the scheme for dead when its $750 million budget proved well inadequate.
Even now, the redesigned Fulton station’s underground subway platforms and corridors, although easier on the eyes, are a little less confusing than the “maze” they were supposed to untangle. To reach this point, it made life hell for the millions who pass through each week.
Meanwhile, the MTA says it won’t open the new corridor to the Cortlandt Street station because few would use it except homeless people. Goodbye, $200 million.
An even worse waste of money is the Port Authority’s Santiago Calatrava-designed WTC Hub. Six years behind schedule, its $2.2 billion budget has swelled to $4 billion, its “soaring bird” profile has collapsed into a lumbering stegosaurus — and still won’t be done until 2015.
Might the same overruns, interruptions and overall chaos afflict a Penn Station overhaul? Is the world round?
Penn Station remains tolerably clean, safe and functional. Its lack of sex appeal hardly justifies the cost and years of chaos that trying to beautify it would entail.
Of course, such real-world considerations rarely get in the way of bold visions for architecture to “ennoble” us — especially when politicians hijack them to guarantee an open-ended gravy train of payouts to cement companies, contractors and construction unions.
This train wreck needs to be stopped in its tracks. Let Penn Station be Penn Station. Remember, many thought it a fine idea in the 1960s. Let it remind us that change is not always to our good.