Penn Station and The Preservation Movement

Contents

1. What the record describes
2. What the timeline shows
3. The myth and its correction

Pennsylvania Station, whose defenders in 1962 asked the city to reuse the McKim, Mead and White building rather than tear it down, stands at the head of a preservation argument that Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group still works within, since the firm favours adaptive reuse that sets old against new instead of imitating history. The station was demolished anyway, between 1963 and 1966. The best short record of how that happened is a single page kept by the New York Preservation Archive Project, and this entry reads it section by section, checking each part against other accounts.¹

What the record describes

The archive opens with the building. It gives the station two full city blocks between 31st and 34th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, says more than 500 buildings were cleared to make room for it, and dates the Beaux Arts design to 1910.¹ It then borrows a line of inventory that has become the station’s epitaph: nine acres of travertine and granite, 84 Doric columns and a vaulted concourse modelled on the baths of Rome.¹

Other accounts fill in the purpose. Hidden Architecture explains that before the station, passengers from the south and west stopped at Jersey City and crossed the Hudson by ferry, and that the Pennsylvania Railroad built its tunnel and gave Charles McKim the commission for a building to mark the new entry to the city.³ 99% Invisible credits the idea to the railroad’s head, Alexander Cassatt, and notes that newspapers of the day called the result a wonder.² TheJournal.ie, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the demolition, describes a pink granite exterior and a concourse vault 150 feet high.⁴

The archive does not hide the building’s decline. By the time demolition was set, it says, the station was run down from poor upkeep and later alterations, and most of the commuters who passed through it daily probably no longer saw its quality.¹ 99% Invisible puts the cause in plain terms: after the Second World War fewer people took the train, and the railroad could not afford to maintain a monument.²

Figure

The building the archive describes

full city blocks, 31st to 34th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues

2

buildings cleared to make room for it

500+

Doric columns

84

of travertine and granite

9 acres

What the timeline shows

The record’s dated entries begin earlier than most retellings. In December 1954 the real estate firm Webb and Knapp, under William Zeckendorf, took an option on the air rights over the station, and in 1955 the railroad and Zeckendorf planned to replace it with a fifty story Palace of Progress over a new station below street level.¹ That scheme lapsed. In 1960 the Madison Square Garden Corporation formed and began planning an arena over the tracks, and on July 25, 1961 The New York Times announced it on page one without mentioning that the station would be demolished; a second story, the archive notes, made that part plain.¹

The opposition formed around the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York. On August 2, 1962 it held a rally; the Museum of the City of New York lists the architect Philip Johnson and Jane Jacobs among the dozens who picketed.⁶ 99% Invisible puts the number of marching architects at about two hundred, in suits, pearls and white gloves, with slogans that rhymed.² The archive adds what the group asked for, which was public minded ownership of the site and an adaptive reuse of the building, and it records a brief filed with the City Planning Commission on January 3, 1963, arguing that the land was already committed to a public purpose.¹

Figure

The archive's timeline

1. 01
   December 1954Webb and Knapp buys an option on the air rights over the station
2. 02
   July 25, 1961A front page story announces a new Madison Square Garden over the tracks
3. 03
   August 2, 1962The Action Group for Better Architecture in New York holds its rally
4. 04
   January 3, 1963The group files a brief against the arena with the City Planning Commission
5. 05
   October 28, 1963Demolition begins, and runs about three years

It did not work. The archive says only a few hundred people were moved to protest, because no neighbourhood lived in the station, and it quotes Jacobs recalling the mood as closer to a wake than a movement.¹ Demolition began on October 28, 1963.¹ A post by Henson Architect, relaying Curbed’s anniversary gallery, draws on the Museum of the City of New York’s photograph archive of the arches and columns coming down.⁸ By 1966, according to 99% Invisible, most of the columns and stone had been dumped in a New Jersey swamp.²

The myth and its correction

The most interesting section of the record is the one that argues with its own subject. The archive names a Myth of Pennsylvania Station: the popular belief that the loss of this one building first moved New Yorkers to seek legal protection for their landmarks.¹ Its correction is that preservationists were organised well before the railroad’s plans became public, and that City Hall under Wagner chose to keep drafting a citywide scheme instead of a rescue aimed at one site, even this one.¹ The station was never designated a landmark, and the law that might have saved it was always a step behind the wrecking crews.¹

Other sources hold both halves of that view at once. The National Trust for Historic Preservation calls the razing a symbol of loss felt across the country and connects it to a national conference of preservationists in Williamsburg in 1964 and to New York’s own law in 1965.⁵ The Museum of the City of New York calls the picket the culmination of more than a decade of struggle, and says the demolition helped bring about the 1965 law.⁶ The archive’s closing judgment is the careful one: the station became an icon that rallied people, yet the credit for the law belongs to many hands and years.¹

What followed is covered in the entries on the Landmarks Law and on Grand Central Terminal, the station the new law later shielded. The air rights sale that set the whole sequence moving is summarised under air rights.

The record lists no objects, but other accounts do. When the Museum of the City of New York marked fifty years of the Landmarks Law in 2015, Hyperallergic reported that the exhibition included a marble eagle head sculpted by Adolph A. Weinman in 1910 and pulled from the station’s wreckage.⁷ It is a small piece of a very large building, and it is on view because the building is not.