Traveling Tuesday: New York City's Penn Station

Traveling Tuesday: 

New York City’s Penn Station

Next week’s Movie Monday will feature the 1945 film The Clock in which New York City’s Penn Station plays an integral role. Named for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the station’s builder and original owner, the structure was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, an architectural firm founded in 1879 that quickly rose in prominence. The design was (and still is) considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style. The Beaux-Arts style is characterized by heavily ornamented surfaces and the use of elements from Greek and Roman architecture, such as columns, combined with French and Italian Renaissance and Baroque influences (also highly ornamental). The style is known for its symmetry, elaborate decorations and use of stone, iron, and glass.

Completed in 1910, the station occupied an 8-acre plot, had eighty-four Doric columns, eleven

platforms serving twenty-one tracks, and the central waiting room measured a block and a half long – the largest indoor space in the city. For the first time there was direct rail access to the city from the south. Before then the Pennsylvania Railroad’s network ended on the western side of the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey, requiring passengers to board ferries to cross the river. New York Central Railroad was a rival, and their line ran from the north under Park Avenue and ended at Grand Central at 42nd Street. Proposals for a cross-Hudson connection were presented in the late 1800s, but the financial panics of the 1890s made potential investors gun shy about providing funds. Proposals for a bridge was also considered but ultimately rejected.

Then came Pennsylvania Railroad’s president Alexander Cassatt who announced in 1901, the company’s plans to tunnel under the river and build a “grand station” on the west side of Manhattan south of 34th Street, at that time a red-light district known for corruption and prostitution. Construction began in June 1903 and was completed in 1908. Unfortunately, having died in 1906, Cassatt did not live to see his dream fulfilled. Instead, his son, Edward, became president and finished the task.

Penn Station opened to the public on November 27, 1910, and by 1945, at its peak saw more than 100 million passengers pass through its doors. Tragically and despite “vociferous dissent,” the aboveground portions of the building were demolished between 1963 and 1966 to make way for a new building. More than one source indicated that the controversial demolition was the impetus for the 1965 New York Landmarks Law which saved Grand Central station and approximately 30,000 other historic buildings throughout New York City.

While growing up in New Jersey, my family and I traveled through Penn Station on numerous occasions. I wish I’d seen the original building.

Photo Credits:
By Bain News Service - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ggbain.09705. Public Domain

William J. Roege, Pennsylvania Station on Seventh Avenue, New York City, 1923. New-York Historical Society, Photographs from New York City and Beyond.

Penn Station, Train Concourse, ca. 1910, photograph, MMW Architectural Record Collection, NYHS Image #50718.

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A Lesson in Love

He thinks he’s too old. She thinks she’s too young. Can these teachers learn that love defies all boundaries?

Born and raised in London, Isobel Turvine knows nothing about farming, but after most of the students in her school evacuate during Operation Pied Piper, she’s left with little to do. Then her friend Margery talks her into joining the Women’s Land Army, and she finds herself working the land at a manor home in Yorkshire that’s been converted to a boys’ school. A teacher at heart, she is drawn to the lads, but the handsome yet stiff-necked headmaster wants her to stick to farming.

Left with an arm that barely works from the last “war to end all wars,” Gavin Emerson agrees to take on the job of headmaster when his school moves from London to Yorkshire, but he’s saddled with the quirky manor owner, bickering among his teachers, and a gaggle of Land Army girls who have turned the grounds into a farm. When the group’s blue-eyed, raven-haired leader nearly runs him down in a car, he admonishes her to stay in the fields, but they are thrown together at every turn. Can he trust her not to break his heart?

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