The Bold Vision to Make Penn Station Great Again

Editor's Note

New York, President Trump, and a few key stakeholders have a once-in-a-century chance to undo one of the most senseless acts of destruction in American cultural history: the replacement of the old Penn Station, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece, with a modernist eye sore. Tom Klingenstein sits down with Alex Washburn of the Grand Penn Community Alliance to discuss what must be done to rebuild a transportation hub worthy of the greatest city in the world.

TK: I’m Tom Klingenstein. With me is Alex Washburn. We’re going to talk about a plan to rebuild the existing Penn Station. But it’s much more than that. The plan calls for a new park and a grand train hall modeled after the original Penn Station. We call this project Grand Penn. Once upon a time, New York City had a train station worthy of the greatest city in America. Built in 1910, the original Penn Station was huge, confident and bold. Built in a classical style, it was a tribute to the greatness of America. Its sheer size made it sublime, inspiring, and at the same time, humble. It was home to the gods, closer to heaven than even New York’s tallest skyscraper. Langston Hughes called it a bulwark for the soul. That was then. Sadly, in 1964 it was torn down and thrown into the swamps of the Meadowlands in what was perhaps the greatest act of architectural vandalism in American history.

It was replaced by the current underground Penn Station, which is a disgrace, much hated by the public, dangerous, inefficient, “Fit only for rats,” as one critic put it. Walking through its low, cramped passageways, you must elbow your way through a thicket of strangers. New York deserves better. Almost four years ago, I was approached by the National Civic Art Society, an organization committed to recovering classical architecture. It was seeking funds to develop a plan to reconstruct the original Penn Station. My first thought was, “How wonderful.” My second thought was, “How unrealistic.” First, you would have to move and rebuild Madison Square Garden. In the unlikely event you could do this, you would then have to convince real estate owners, railroads and a long list of city, state, and federal government agencies, each with its own agenda.

Realistically, it was hopeless, and yet, for one reason or another, I had hope. Sometimes the supply is priceless, and so I put together a team of transportation experts to see what they could come up with. The team is headed up by Alex Washburn, who was an award-winning architect who began his career working on the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorial renovation, as well as several classical new buildings in Washington, D.C. He is the founding president of the Moynihan Station Development Corporation, which designed Moynihan Train Hall, the new Amtrak station located in the old classical post office just across from Grand Penn.

Alex Washburn: Tom, thank you so much for having me here, and thank you for that introduction. When you were describing the original Penn Station, I was getting goosebumps.

TK: We’re going to start by playing a short video walkthrough of Grand Penn, and then I’ll ask you to describe the project in more detail.

AW: Grand Penn is on the existing footprint of Penn Station. Now, this is in a context of all of Midtown Manhattan. Up here to the north you have Times Square, here to the east you have Herald Square. To the west is the new Hudson Yards. The High Line Park comes and touches from the south. Everything else blossomed from the 1910, the late Great Penn Station that you’ve seen these beautiful pictures. So, how do we get back to that? Back in ’64 when the original station, and it was really, it was more decapitated than it was demolished, and on top of it was placed what’s now Madison Square Garden. So, what if we built a new and great arena across the street?

Here in this empty lot where the Hotel Penn used to be, but is now demolished, that would open up Penn Station to become Grand Penn. Let’s look at it element by element. In the original Penn Station we had the most magnificent facade on seventh Avenue. That was torn down, tossed into the Jersey Marshes. However, Seventh Avenue is the entrance of Penn Station, and today it is not. Let’s recreate it. Let’s rebuild that grand entrance on Seventh Avenue, and from there we can enter into this next great space, the train hall. Skylit enormous, larger than Grand Central, over an acre of glass open to the sky.

TK: Now, how does it compare in size to the new Moynihan station?

AW: Oh, it’s much larger than the Moynihan station. The Moynihan station has 35,000 square feet of glass, we have 52,000 square feet of glass.

TK: And how about in height?

AW: The height, I believe we are 125 feet from the floor to the peak. And the Moynihan Train Hall, I believe is 75 feet.

TK: Let’s proceed. Now we’re looking, I think, at the train hall.

AW: Yes, so now we’re looking at the train hall. And you ask, “What is this place?” This place is the place of coming together. Where you mentioned earlier in your description of the way it is now, that we rush past strangers. That’s because we’re in a rat-worn, we’re underground. But when you’re in something like this that has light, that has a sense of civic majesty in it, strangers cease to be strangers and become fellow citizens.

TK: Beneath this train hall, which is above ground, above grade, beneath that is a train concourse, which is where you wait for a train.

AW: Well, beneath this level is the concourse level. Concourse means anywhere that you can board a train. Right now, the concourse level at Penn Station is a warrant of dead-end corridors. It’s very constraining, but we have opened it up, made a universal concourse that you can see from one end to the other, 600,000 square feet. That is an enormous space.

TK: And that compares to what today?

AW: That is as large as Heathrow Terminal 4 in London, one of the best transportation facilities in the world.

TK: So, it’s huge?

AW: It’s huge. It’s huge, purposefully.

TK: Now, this is where you’d wait for a train-

AW: Well, yes.

TK: … or not?

AW: Yes. Well, the part of our operational strategy is to remove the notion of waiting. There’s boarding. Let’s say your train is in an hour. You don’t really wait. You go to the wonderful retail in the train hall. You perhaps go to the new park that we’ll talk about later. You’ll know digitally when your train is going and where it’s going-

TK: But now, Alex, some people have gone, “Wait.” And one of the things I noticed and have always noticed, I don’t see any seating.

AW: We have seating. We have seating-

TK:It’s just we don’t see it in these pictures?

AW: Oh, no, no, we see it around. … Every escalator, every stair down is wrapped in a bench and planting, so that we do have room to sit. And we think that’s an important statement, because now, when you go to a transportation designer, they take away the benches.

TK: Now to the park.

AW: This enormous concourse, what does it have above it? New York City’s a vertical city. We have this tradition of putting parks over infrastructure. You go to Bryant Square Park in New York, a fabulous park. What we have done is, on top of our concourse, which has 32-foot high ceilings itself, on top of that, there is a park the size of Bryant Park, and this is an area without parks. Think of what this park does for both the community and for the real estate around it. It creates a new address, real desirability.

TK: The biggest question that people have, I think, is it really realistic to move Madison Square Garden?

AW: It is realistic. I was involved in a previous effort to move to the back of the Farley building behind the Moynihan Train Hall.

TK: And the Farley building is the post office?

AW: The Farley building is the post office, yes. Madison Square Garden has moved several times in its storied career, that’s why it’s called Madison Square. Even the garden part refers to an old roof garden. So, it has moved in the past, but it always has to move to someplace that makes sense. Across the street on Seventh Avenue was mentioned as a possible location, and also, I was involved in a quite serious effort to move Madison Square Garden behind the Moynihan Train Hall in the back of the post office building. It went very, very far and stopped perhaps two weeks short through the scandal that Governor Spitzer found himself in. Client number nine, if you remember that one. So, is it realistic? Well, let me put it another way. Is it desirable? Would the garden want to move? That’s I think the lens we should look at it through.

TK: Now, the garden is owned by the Dolan family.

AW: It is.

TK: As you said, they would have to be incentivized to move.

AW: They would have to want to move. It’s a business decision. Mr. Dolan is a businessman. He has—

TK: Would he have to put up any money?

AW: No, no, no. The idea here is to remove the issue of cost here, that it would be an even swap. Simply, we build a new arena in a location that is acceptable to them to specifications that are acceptable to them. And when it is finished, they could move across the street. No interruption, no cost.

TK: Have you talked to the Dolans?

AW: Yes, we’ve spoken to their organization several times, and I believe they would enjoy a phone call from a principal.

TK: Maybe a phone call from the president?

AW: I think, yes.

TK: Okay. Now I want to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you, this is not making you rich, so why do you want to be involved?

AW: Oh, Tom, that’s a … I was put to work on Penn Station as a 33-year-old by Senator Moynihan, who told me, “make it inevitable.” And I’ve been working all my life in some capacity or another to make it so. But I think the real question is, why are you so doggedly involved?

TK: Well, the first answer is, because I don’t think anybody else would be quite this silly and take this kind of risk and spend so much. Now, I’m poking fun at myself a little bit. I think the reasons include beauty. The old Penn Station was beautiful, and people understand that. We’ve done some polls, the American citizens prefer by a wide margin classical over modern architecture. And that’s regardless of political affiliation, regardless of race or ethnicity. We don’t talk very much about architecture. We as a people, there are very few even architectural critics anymore.

But architecture is very important. We walk by it every day. It has an effect on our emotions. Ugly buildings depress us, and beautiful buildings inspire us. So, that’s one reason. I think another reason is Penn Station, the original one, is part of our history. In Europe when grand old buildings are demolished after the Civil War, after the second war, when many of them were bombed, we built them exactly as they were, because they understand that these buildings are part of their history. And history is very, very important. It tells us who we are. It guides us. It inspires us. Now, we tend not to rebuild our own old buildings. We’re very progressive and we think new is always better than old. And that may be true in some circumstances, but not always.

Partly I wanted to do it, because I think it’s a gift to New York and to America. This classical architecture is uniquely America. We have a sort of theoretical foundation of our country as expressed most notably in the Declaration of Independence, where it tells us that all persons are created equal. Well, architecture, classical architecture in this case, is a physical manifestation of that theoretical foundation. And lastly, I can’t explain it, lastly, the reasons are not really rational. It’s just something I felt I had to do for whatever reason. A lot of things in life you can’t explain, but you feel in one way or another that it’s something you’re almost destined to do. And I fit the Penn Station project in that category of things I felt I really have to do.

AW: You had said to me once you are doing this to uphold Western civilization. I thought, “Wow, that’s interesting. How does Penn Station train station fit into the arc of Western civilization? And then you put two concepts together that I think nailed it. That Western civilization is a combination of Athenian civic virtue and New York hutzpah. Without the daring of New York there is no Western civilization. It’s a combination of civics and daring.

TK: We’ve spent three years in this planning process, and people may wonder, “Why does it take so long?”

AW: Senator Moynihan asked me that very same question when I was a 33-year-old. And the answer is, it takes so long because we make it take so long and we can make it take much less time. But that requires a leadership that we haven’t had in America for a long time. It’s lead, follow, or get out of the way. And with that kind of leadership we can make things happen in light speed. So, things don’t have to take so long. We have been at the very beginning of pushing the boulder.

TK: But is there more planning to do, or could you start tomorrow?

AW: We are at the point now where I believe we have to begin building. We can start. We have done wonderful plans thanks to you. We have submitted to USDOT a full set of drawings for the concept plan, and now we’re at the point of making it happen through a deal, through leadership.

TK: Now, I gather New York Governor Hochul has her own plan. You might describe that.

AW: Oh God, that plan, it’s a headache. It compounds all the errors that we have been making since demolishing Penn Station. It is an underground plan of corridors. It is a plan of such low ambition cloaked in this high rhetoric that you know something fishy is going on.

TK: It doesn’t build anything above ground, right? It’s just renovating what’s below ground.

AW: It renovates what’s below ground, but it compounds the problem, because this is not a question of surfaces. This is a question of people moving through a facility and of air moving through a facility. And as their engineers have dug into it, they’ve realized, “Oh my God, we don’t have enough capacity with the garden on top of us to move air in an emergency, to evacuate smoke.” It becomes, it’s a very technical issue, but it’s life threatening.

TK: And now, what does her plan cost?

AW: Her plan costs $7.5 billion.

TK: And our plan?

AW: $7.5 billion.

TK: Now, why should our plan cost the same thing when we are going to build a new Madison Square Garden, and her plan does not call for moving Madison Square Garden?

AW: Our plan costs the same, including a new Madison Square Garden, because it is immensely cheaper to build when you do not have an operating arena on top of you. We can use this invention called a crane. We can use machinery to move materials. When you have an operating arena above you and an operating train station below you, everything has to be done by hand and it has to be done twice.

TK: Twice because?

AW: Because you can’t interrupt either the arena or the trains.

TK: I see.

AW: So, you make a temporary version while you build the more permanent version, then you swap over and you end up building it twice.

TK: Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, there are a lot of parties that need to be convinced. The Dolans are just one. What are some of the others?

AW: The other is a major land owner, Vornado, run by Steve Roth, a great New York businessman. And then there are seven additional smaller owners to complete the parcel of land necessary for the new garden. We have been talking to them. I believe this deal can happen. But let me stress again, it requires somebody who really knows how to make a deal.

TK: That’s where we need Trump.

AW: That’s where we need Trump, yes. Bureaucrats can’t make a deal, it’s just not in their DNA. And you ask why. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t happened, because this is a public-private deal. It needs someone to create the deal, not to just write a report or create an interagency task force, [inaudible 00:22:47]-

TK: We know Trump is a dealmaker.

AW: We know he’s a dealmaker. We know he’s a builder.

TK: And also, I think this kind of project on this scale, this boldness would appeal to Trump. He told me once that he’s not just competent, he’s really, really competent. That was Trump in his typically modest.

AW: Well, then let’s make sure that this train station is really, really good.

TK: Absolutely. As you said, we need a dealmaker and we need a specialist in long shots. And that’s what Trump has done over his career, and what could be more of a long shot than winning the presidency twice. And of course, the other thing he has is access to money.

AW: That’s true.

TK: Now, he is rather busy, and I haven’t heard him talk about Penn Station. I don’t even know if he knows about this plan. Folks in his Department of Transportation, they know, because you’ve been talking to them, right?

AW: Yeah, yeah. We took down our plans last week, I’m going again on Monday. Wonderful meeting. Wonderful meeting. I said, “You probably want to see the videos. They’re beautiful and colorful.” And the guy said, “No, I want to see the black and white drawings.” We opened them and looked at them page by page.

TK: He’s in the business of downsizing, right? But here he has an opportunity to show his vision of the future. Now, there’s another thing that probably … Excuse me, Alex, go ahead.

AW: Well, I mean, we’re downsizing the apparatus, we’re not downsizing the vision. Something as an architect that I learned very early on, the biggest projects get done by a team of six people. Just because you inflate the head count doesn’t make it any better. I think what he understands is that you can do great things with a small focused team in a public private partnership. You don’t need an army of bureaucrats in order to achieve things.

TK: Now, as you know, not everyone is a big fan of Trump, but my view is, look, whether you like him or hate him, when he’s in the right, you stand behind him. On our team we have Republicans and Democrats, and I don’t even know which is which, because this is not really, I don’t think, a political project.

AW: This is something we can all do together to help bring this even more together.

TK: And I think this is once in a century opportunity. We made a big, big mistake when we demolished the original Penn Station. This is our chance to make amends. The chance will not come again. Alex, thank you.

AW: Thank you, Tom.