When the Old Penn Station Was Demolished, New York Lost Its Faith (original) (raw)

New York|When the Old Penn Station Was Demolished, New York Lost Its Faith

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/nyregion/old-penn-station-pictures-new-york.html

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One of Penn Station’s 22 famous eagles being removed from the building’s one remaining facade. The statues ended up in far-flung places like the New Jersey Botanical Garden and on the roof of Cooper Union. July 12, 1966.Credit...Jack Manning/The New York Times

Past Tense

Today’s version is humiliating and bewildering.

April 24, 2019

There was a time when New York City had the gateway it deserved.

Demolished more than half a century ago, the former Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead & White was hardly the first great building in town to face the wrecking ball. The Lenox Library by Richard Morris Hunt and the old Waldorf-Astoria by Henry Hardenbergh on Fifth Avenue also came down. For generations, New Yorkers embraced the mantra of change, assuming that what replaced a beloved building would probably be as good or better.

The Frick mansion, by Carrère and Hastings, replaced the Lenox Library. The Empire State Building replaced the old Waldorf.

Then, a lot of bad Modern architecture, amid other signs of postwar decline, flipped the optimistic narrative.

When Penn Station became during the mid-1960s a subterranean rat’s maze, the city seemed to be heading very definitely south. The historic preservation movement, which rose from the vandalized station’s ashes, was born of a new pessimism.

Image

Looking east from Ninth Avenue, the razed blocks of the Tenderloin neighborhood that would become the site of Penn Station. July 14, 1904.

People today forget that the original station’s construction, shortly after the turn of the last century, caused its own tumult. Several midtown blocks needed to be leveled, which meant displacing thousands of residents from the largely African-American community in what was once known as the Tenderloin district in Manhattan. The emptied lot, awaiting McKim’s masterpiece, now looks almost comically vast in photographs.

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