All three of the region’s major airports combined (J.F.K., LaGuardia, Newark Liberty) see only a fraction of that number. By 2019, Penn was struggling to accommodate more than six hundred thousand passengers a day. But the decline reversed, as ridership on the commuter lines boomed with suburban development. Indeed, traffic through Penn Station had been declining since 1945. This entombment happened at a moment when many Americans-starting with Robert Moses, the unelected official who directed New York’s infrastructure priorities for forty years-believed that the age of rail had passed, and that automobiles were the future. During the construction, hundreds of massive support pillars were driven down through the station, clogging the walkways and platforms, turning the whole place into a basement. Above, on the manhole cover, rose Madison Square Garden, a twenty-thousand-seat arena. The arena opened in 1968, along with a bland new office block known as Two Penn. We were in a dreary waiting room near Eighth Avenue. “They basically built this manhole cover and sealed up the station,” Chakrabarti said. The extensive rail operations below it were left underground. How did it come to this? The original Penn Station building, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece, was knocked down in the early nineteen-sixties, after its owners struck a deal with a developer. A few weeks later, a broken sewer line poured fetid water into a busy concourse. “Very low ceilings and very congested space is a very bad idea.” In 2017, a Friday-night crowd panicked by rumors of gunshots left sixteen people injured. “I’m always worried about safety here,” Chakrabarti said. Later, passengers would cram into the tight, airless pink-and-beige space to watch for a track assignment, which would signal a stampede for a single escalator. It was midday, off peak, so even the New Jersey Transit concourse known as “the pit” was not especially crowded.
People slept on the floor, propped against columns, surrounded by their battered possessions. Chakrabarti is fifty-six, tall, with a well-trimmed white chin-strap beard.įarther down, toward the platforms, there were more issues: cramped passages with no signs, wires spilling from missing ceiling panels. His tone was equal parts earnest concern and professorial detachment he was a professor at Columbia for seven years, worked as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s director of city planning for Manhattan, runs a global architecture studio, and lives with his family about a mile from Penn Station, through which they are often obliged to travel. “Down here, the signage has always been a huge issue,” Chakrabarti said.
Three railroads and six busy subway lines converge in Penn Station, but from where we were it was hard to find your way to any of them. The area where we had entered resembles a dingy subterranean shopping mall, dominated by fast-food joints-Dunkin’ Donuts, Jamba Juice, Krispy Kreme. In Penn, the architecture generally tells you to go away. “It’s the architecture that tells you where to go in a train station,” Chakrabarti said. On our left, a man was wrestling a baby carriage up a staircase, bumping step by step toward the street. We entered from Seventh Avenue, going down a narrow escalator with so little headroom that I flinched and ducked.
I was there recently with Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect and city planner who has been involved for decades in efforts, most of them futile, to improve the station. Pennsylvania Station, in west midtown, is the busiest railroad station in the Western Hemisphere.
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