When Manhattan’s original Pennsylvania Station was demolished in 1963, it marked the undignified end to one of America’s great public works, a monolithic Beaux Arts train terminal with Roman-style columns and a spacious central waiting area that was at the time the city’s largest indoor space.
In its place rose Madison Square Garden – home of NBA’s New York Knicks and NHL’s New York Rangers – while train commuters were forced underground into gloomy, claustrophobic, low-ceilinged corridors when the redesign was completed in 1968.
“Through Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god,” the architectural historian Vincent Scully famously lamented. “One scuttles in now like a rat.”
But a dramatic new vision for the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere calls for a return to the original station’s grandeur from 1910.
New renderings show a rectangular stone facade lined with imposing columns along a grand entryway. Inside, a sunlight-drenched concourse boasts soaring ceilings more than 15 metre high in places. There are bronze finishes and other ornamental details, like a bas-relief of the city’s famous skyline and a large station clock.
Inside one entryway, an inside wall bears the seal and name of President Donald Trump, who had Amtrak assume control of the project last year after decades of political infighting among transit agencies and opposition to moving MSG from billionaire owner James Dolan.
Trump has floated renaming his hometown station in his honour as he’s sought to burnish his legacy through public works projects, from a massive new White House ballroom to a triumphal arch. Kathy Hochul has said it would never happen.
For now, though, the name etched across the proposed grand facade would still read “Pennsylvania Station,” according to the renderings. They were released by Amtrak, which owns the terminal, and Penn Transformation Partners, the design and development consortium picked for the project.
The proposed design draws from the ornate, Beaux-Arts design of Grand Central Terminal, the city’s other major rail hub, as well as Art Deco landmarks like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, according to lead design architect Vishaan Chakrabarti.
The vision, he said, is to restore Penn Station’s place among the pantheon of the city’s greatest landmarks.
“There was this fearless embrace of ornament and decoration that in some ways we’ve lost,” Chakrabarti said. “We want to bring some of that sense of craftsmanship back.”
The redesign is projected to cost roughly $8 billion, and construction is targeted to begin before the end of 2027, officials said. Penn Station would remain in operation throughout as the project progresses in phases over about six years.
Plans floated over the decades have called for relocating MSG, but the plan is for the “World’s Most Famous Arena” to remain in place. A theatre owned by MSG and built directly above the tracks, however, would have to be razed.
More than 600,000 commuters use the rail hub on any given workday, or more than the three major international airports that serve greater New York City – John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty – combined.
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