99% Invisible - 147- Penn Station Sucks

Episode Date: January 7, 2015

New Yorkers are known to disagree about a lot of things. Who’s got the best pizza? What’s the fastest subway route? Yankees or Mets? But all 8.5 million New Yorkers are likely to agree on one thing: Penn Station sucks. … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. New Yorkers are known to disagree about a lot of things. Who's got the best pizza? What's the fastest subway route? Yankees or Mets? But I would bet that if you pulled every New Yorker, all 8,500,000 of them,

they would agree on one thing. Pennst Socks! That's Ann Heperman, our friend and reporter in New York who also hates Penn Station. There is nothing joyful about Penn Station. It's windowless, airless, crowded, 650,000 people have to suffer through it on their daily commute. That's more traffic than the region's three airports combined. Luckily though, I'm not one of them. We're in Penn Station now. We tagged along with our unlucky friend, Jonathan

Minhevar. He's a producer for this American life and commutes from his home in Jersey to Penn Station. His experience of Penn Station is like being at a Black Friday sale at Walmart every day, always. Like the whole time people are pushing you, squeezing through a tiny stairway to get down to the tracks. It's the only place in which people are actually touching your ass and you're not supposed to say anything about it. The air is often hot and stuffy.

It feels like whatever wizard of Oz is behind, like that they are just watching in their little tower and watching, like, oh look at them crush each other, look at them want to eat each other. It's awful. It's awful. And it's my best way to get home every day. Poor guy.

And you can also see some Penn station hate in popular culture about New York, like in this episode of Broad City, where one character Abby gets dumped because her boyfriend would rather end a relationship than take a train out of Penn Station. Penn Station, I can't. It's disgusting. It's kind of a deal breaker for me.

But here's the worst thing about Penn Station. This drab, low ceiling, uninspiring, unexceptional building was once the opposite of all of those things. With a vast space, I mean the building itself was the fourth largest building in the world when it was finished. That's Jill Jones describing the original Penn Station. She wrote a great book about it, called Conquering Gotham. The original Penn station in New York City opened in 1910. It was majestic.

Imagine the Parthenon, but for trains. The facade was a line of massive Doric columns. You'd walk through them to send down a grand staircase and into a waiting room designed to remind you of a Roman temple. With these very high ceilings and very spectacular light coming through, and that ushered you into all of these staircases that took you down into the train tracks. And the guy behind all of this was Alexander Cassatt, the head of Pennsylvania Railroad. With the original Penn Station, Cassatt was fixing a problem that had plagued New York for years. Namely, it was a complete pain in the ass to get from New Jersey to Manhattan.

People commuting from Jersey had to schlep across the Hudson River on a slow ferry. So Cassatt built the first-ever train tunnel to run under the Hudson River. It was considered one of the greatest engineering feats ever. I know we say that all the time, but we really mean it this time. And Cassatt built Penn Station Terminal to crown his monumental achievement. The architecture celebrated both the past and the future. It was a combination of this very ancient grandeur and this extremely industrialized form of transportation. These really powerful trains.

Newspapers called Penn Station the eighth wonder of the world. People call a lot of things the eighth wonder of the world that we really mean at this time. Everyone loved it. Everyone that is except for what other railroad family that owned a little station right across town. This then made the existing Grand Central Station, which was owned by the Vanderbilt family, look really shabby. At the time when the original Penn Station was built, Grand Central Station was not anywhere near as grand as it is now. But the Vanderbilt just couldn't be outdone by this other train station. Clearly, how embarrassing. So in Grand Central needed a little touch-up.

The Vanderbilt decided to tear it down and build a newer, shinier, grander, grand central station. The one we know today. So there was this very early connection between the two. So Penn Station and Grand Central started out as enemies but as the years passed they were like the last two drunks at the party trying to keep the night from coming to an end. The country was in a very different sort of mindset that new was good and flying was good and cars were

good and trains were bad. Penn station was only 40 years old at this point but already its days were numbered. After World War II, passenger trains just weren't as popular anymore. Pennsylvania Railroad was just leading money. The company couldn't afford the upkeep of Penn station's grander. Everything that had been glorious about it

really got sort of covered with grime and it was dirty and they didn't fix the broken windows and there are all these pigeons flying around. It's really hard to wash pigeon poop off a forestry arch-class ceiling. So people did not feel that this was this glorious place, they felt it was really crummy. For a lot of people, Penn Station had become a money-sucking albatross of a station that also sat on nine acres of precious midtown Manhattan real estate. Remember this is New York City. Real estate in New York is in the airspace.

Pennsylvania railroad executives knew that they could make tons of money if they could rent out the space above the station to a big tall building. There were proposals to build a parking garage, amphitheaters, a 40-story office tower. But the one that won out was the futuristic sports and entertainment palace known as Madison Square Garden. The deal that Pennsylvania Railroad cut with the developer Irving Felt was to keep the tracks below Penn Station and sell the rights to the airspace on top. And blow up Penn Station in the process. Here's where I wish we could say that the whole city banded together to save the station,

but actually no one really cared, except for a small group of activist architects. Agbany, the action group for better architecture in New York. Agbany, it's a terrible acronym, but definitely a cause I can support. Peter Sampton was one of those architects. I went over to his house on the Upper West Side, and we looked through old photographs from the only march to save Penn Station.

It is me. I think this was my sign right here that said, don't sell our city short. The date was August 2, 1962. There were 200 rowdy architects. We would have to wear respectable clothing, because otherwise they wouldn't take us seriously. Just kidding about the rowdy part. These were architects. The men wore suits.

The women wore white gloves and pearls. We each sort of prided ourselves on doing better lettering than the next sign. They marched up and down 7th Avenue, shouting, Polish don't demolish, save our heritage, things like that is what we would say. I mean, keep in mind, none of us were ever in a picket line before. You don't say. Still, the protest made the front page of the New York Times. Architects fight Penn Station plan.

But it was too late. On October 28, 1963, at 9am, Jackhammer's torrent to Penn Station's granite slabs. The demolition took a long time, about three years. You know, it was like a great animal because you'd sort of a black of the outside and then you saw the inside which was all this beautiful pink, so it was like the flesh was opened up with a knife. And after three years most of the original Penn stations remains the door column, the granite and travertine details, all of that had been dumped into a

New Jersey swamp. And of course they gave us a new Penn station, one that was summarily hated by everyone. In 1968, architectural historian Vincent Scully famously remarked that, whereas before, one entered the city like a god. One's skulls in now, like a rat. After the destruction of Penn station, Mayor Robert Wagner created the first landmarks preservation commission.

In 1965, the group helped pass the city's first-ever landmarks law so that something is drastic as the destruction of Penn Station could never happen again. But the landmark laws were flawed. It was a joke. New Yorkers are so blunt. That's Roberta Gratz. She wrote award-winning stories about the problems with the city's landmark laws for the New York Post are so blunt. That's Roberta Gratz. She wrote award-winning stories about the problems with the city's landmark laws for the New York Post in the 1970s. For those of you who are

too young to know that the New York Post used to be a really good newspaper. There were a number of problems with the landmark laws. The biggest one though was that the landmarks commission didn't meet all that much. They met for six months every three years. So if you missed your window to get your favorite New York City building landmark, tough luck. And in the meantime, the bulldozer operated at will. Grat says a lot of buildings were lost even after the landmark laws were passed, like the singer building, which was once the tallest building in the world, and the old metropolitan opera house, and the Astor Hotel. And then in 1968, Penn Station's old rival Grand Central Station was poised to be yet another

pile of rubble. Here in the cathedral like faces of the terminal itself robbing hot of a nation's little trouble. We have a life. I love Grand Central Station. Hands down it is my favorite place in the city. Welcome to Grand Central Terminal. Kent Barrowick is just as excited as I am to be here.

He's been involved in saving New York City's historic buildings for decades. We're standing under Grand Central's beautiful, vaulted green ceiling, which is decorated with constellations. I just love looking up at it. You and every other person. Let's see if we can find anybody doing this rare to community without finding somebody, taking a picture or what was one where she's just about to take a picture. Grand Central feels like a throwback to what I feel like the old Penn station must have been like.

Just like the original Penn station, Grand Central was a hard building to keep clean. Kent Barwick points to a small patch of black in the far corner of the ceiling. Just to the left of there there seems to be a piece of journey limestone and a piece of journey ceiling. I think that's the shows what the ceiling was like, which was essentially nicotine coated. I was from there, everybody smoked all the time. That black ceiling square was left on purpose to remind people what Grand Central was like back in the day.

In the 1960s, Grand Central's history was almost a carbon copy of pen stations. They were losing money because the building was so expensive to maintain, and fewer people were taking trains. Just like Penn station. Railroad executives decided they needed to sell the airspace on top of the station and invite developers to build. Saying hey, wouldn't a 55-story office tower be nice on top of this, baby? Which would demolish Grand Central's facade and most of its interior. But here's where the story of Grand Central and Penn Station diverge.

Remember those landmark laws that happened in the years after the original Penn Station was demolished? Well, as weak as they were, they did manage to get Grand Central designated as a landmark. So the city denies the railroad executives' plans. The owners of Grand Central were not placed. They wanted the money they were going to get from selling their air rights, the space above Grand Central, so they sued the city. The case was a long one. It went on for nearly a decade.

And it was a bit of a nail-biter. Grand Central nearly lost in 1975 when a state judge ruled against the city's designation of it as a landmark. The new mayor, Abe Beam, almost didn't appeal the ruling, saying against the city's designation of it as a landmark. The new mayor, Abe Beam, almost in appeal to the ruling, saying that the city was poised to lose millions in court costs. So Kent Barwick and others created the committee to save Grand Central. With one member who was a bit of a game changer. I think if there is a great effort, even if it's at the 11th hour, you can succeed.

And I know that that's what we'll do. Enter Jacqueline Kennedy-O-Nasses. Thank you. Kennedy-O-Nasses fronted a save grand central press conference held in 1975 by the Municipal Arts Society. Kent Barwick was at that press conference. He says that with Jackie O. so prominently involved, the fight went from a New York battle to a national one. And people began to write in, you know,

because Iowa had a $5 dollar bill enclosed. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And on June 26, 1978, the highest court in the land ruled in favor of New York City's landmark laws. Just as William Brennan wrote of Grand Central's architecture, quote, such examples are not so plentiful in New York City that we can afford to lose any of the few we have. And we must preserve them in a meaningful way. In other words, Grand Central would not suffer the same fate as its old friend and foe, Penn

Station. So the landmark laws, with a lot of help from Jack-Yo-Nasses, squeaked out of wind, and all of these years later, one of the ways people comfort themselves about the loss of the original Penn Station is with this idea that the laws that came out of the destruction of Penn Station saved Grand Central. So you know it's okay because it died for cause. I don't think Grand Central would have been saved without Penn Station. Penn Station sacrificed itself so that Grand Central could live.

That was Peter Sampton. You heard from him earlier. He was one of the architects that fought and failed to save Penn Station. But the tie between the destruction of Penn Station and the saving of Grand Central is actually kind of tenuous. For Roberta Gratz, it was Jackie O. Not the landmark laws that saved Grand Central. It's all very romantic to assume that the demolition of something so historic as Penn Station would have precipitated a strong landmarks law. It just isn't true. A sacrificial land like Penn Station can only do so much. People have to actually fight and win like they did with Grand Central for laws to have

teeth. Roberta Gratz was actually one of those people. The reporting she did on the landmarks commission is just one of the things that led to the landmark laws ultimately being strengthened. And of course, the Supreme Court upholding those laws in the grand central case set an important precedent for saving future landmarks.

These days, it's still a fight to save a building. But the laws are there, and they're stronger now than they once were. So if you're a beautiful old building in New York, you don't have to rely on a celebrity endorsement or a rag tag group of architect activists chanting, We'll be with you live and something to turn by. PMTA, please. Thank you for your cooperation. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Ann Heverman. Thanks to the WNYC Archives and Julia Barton for her help in editing. 99% Invisible is Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced at the offices

of Arxine, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and hang out with other people who like the show on Facebook. All of us are fascinating on Twitter. The search for 99% of visible and you can find us and follow us, we have a great Tumblr but you're always welcome at our place at 99pi.org. From PRX.