This past Sunday, “Mad Men” (Season 3 Episode 2) referenced the venerable architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable when Paul Kinsey and Pete Campbell were meeting with the developers of Madison Square Garden, discussing plans to knock down Penn Station.
It quotes Ms. Huxtable’s article in the New York Times from 1963 about Penn Station, called “How to Kill a City”. The New York Times has offered the full article in PDF to download and read here.
A eulogy in October of ’63 ran in the editorial section:
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.
- “Farewell to Penn Station,” New York Times, Oct 30, 1963
Comparing the old to the new, Vincent Scully of Yale University remarked,
One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.
The original Penn Station was a steel and glass shrine to transportation, an elegant Beaux-Arts temple with its 150 foot high ceilings and a waiting room modeled after the Roman Baths of Caracalla.
Now it is an underground Habitrail™, lit by yellowed fluorescents and flavored by the odors of Roy Rogers™ and Cinnabon™ stinking down the corridors. Excepting the mad scurry for Amtrak platforms after the track number has finally been revealed on the big board, it is an oppressive space completely without joy.
photographer unknown
Couple in Penn Station Sharing Farewell Kiss Before He Ships Off to War During WWII by Alfred Eisenstaedt
Life Magazine has posted an entire series by Eisenstaedt of WWII soldiers’ farewells at Penn Station here.
Circa 1910, Detroit Publishing Company; click to view the full size image
Berenice Abbott, printed ca. 1935
AP Photo/Matty Zimmerman
Peter Moore; click to view full size
Peter Moore and his wife Barbara documented the death of Penn Station and published their work, The Destruction Of Penn Station.
today
The only consolation is that Penn Station’s demolition was a large factor in the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965.
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