On this day in New York · November 27, 1910
Penn Station Opens, Modeled on a Roman Bath
The Pennsylvania Railroad built New Yorkers a front door fit for an emperor, and lost it fifty-three years later in a demolition that built the city's preservation movement instead.
The facts
- Full opening
- November 27, 1910 (LIRR service had begun September 8, 1910)
- Architects
- McKim, Mead & White; lead designer Charles Follen McKim
- Main waiting room
- 314 feet 4 inches long, 108 feet 8 inches wide, 150 feet tall
- Materials
- 490,000 cubic feet of pink granite and 27,000 short tons of steel
Pennsylvania Station opened its full service on November 27, 1910, after the Long Island Rail Road had already begun running through it that September once the East River tunnels were finished. McKim, Mead & White designed the building, with Charles Follen McKim modeling the main waiting room on the frigidarium, the cold-bathing hall, of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. The whole project ran about $114 million, and the finished station covered eight acres between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from 31st to 33rd Street. It gave New York its first direct rail link to the south and gave the city a civic room built to make you feel small in the good way, the kind Rome built for citizens, not just emperors.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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The tragedy is that our own times not only could not produce such a building, but cannot even maintain it.
Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in The New York Times, 1963
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The above-ground station came down starting October 28, 1963, and the outrage over losing it pushed the city to pass its landmarks law in 1965, creating the Landmarks Preservation Commission that has protected Grand Central and thousands of other buildings ever since. Every time you walk into a New York building the city refused to let a developer tear down, you're standing in Penn Station's afterlife.
Sources
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