Midtown Manhattan is facing its most important land-use decision since the destruction of the glorious original Penn Station 58 years ago. I’m talking here about the soul of the streets, not just the infrastructure or politics. Former Gov. Cuomo’s Empire Station Complex project grants Vornado Realty Trust the rights to break zoning codes and construct 10 more glass towers, declaring the Penn Station area “blighted.” This would make generic dead space out of the sidewalks of New York. It would displace hundreds of small businesses, evict residents and demolish Midtown’s finite number of historic buildings.
I can no longer enter the beloved stadiums, restaurants or movie theaters of my grandfathers. The mystique of old Penn Station in the early 1960s was not lost on me as a child. On trips to the city from Long Island, I thought if I ever lost hold of my mother’s hand, I’d be lost forever. A Yogi Berra Yoo-hoo sign in Astoria was the last image commuters saw before the train submerged into total darkness under the East River, careening and squawking like a cart in a Coney Island spook house. The instant the train door slid open at Penn Station, the underground bowels of the city hit you square in the face. The smell of grime and hot dog counters and Con Edison steam vents.
At old Penn Station, I remember the unmistakable face of Morgan Freeman (yes, that Morgan Freeman) smiling broadly behind the counter at Nedicks’s serving hot dogs. It was the young actor’s first job fresh from Mississippi. A dozen city newspapers were hawked by newsies, while shoeshine boys gave spit shines amidst the steampunk ironworks and choo-choo trains. Penn Station Magazines—my favorite newsstand—survived for decades in the diminished rathole of Penn Station, until recently.
I realize these sentiments don’t translate into today’s real estate dollars. But at stake in Penn Station’s neighborhood are a thousand budget rooms at the Hotel Pennsylvania, beacon to a million tourists who otherwise couldn’t afford the city. (Their phone number is still “PEnnsylvania 6-5000,” the Glenn Miller hit of 1940, which still plays when you call for a rez.)
Among 50 buildings at risk for demolition under eminent domain are three churches that have evaded landmark status: The gothic St. John the Baptist, built in 1872, the storybook St. Francis Roman Catholic Church, built in 1891, and St. Michael’s, built in 1905. Historic structures that would be wiped off the map include The Stewart Hotel, the Penn Station Powerhouse (the last remaining vestige, built from the same granite), the Penn Terminal, Equitable Life Assurance, and Fairmont buildings. During my childhood, there was a secret back-issue magazine warehouse next to the Gimbel’s skybridge (under threat of demolition). Likewise, at Willoughby’s Camera Emporium (founded 1898), I purchased my 8mm film reels for kids of Universal horror classics.
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” said Winston Churchill. He was asking that they rebuild the House of Commons exactly as it had been before the Nazis bombed it. It may be a pipe dream to rebuild the original Penn Station, the lost Beaux-Arts masterwork. Old World stonemasons are nowhere to be found. But the Empire Station Complex will grind the remaining funky streets around Penn Station into pablum. It enriches only Vornado Realty, which already refers to the area as “the Vornado campus.” The glut of empty office space (vacancy rates are already ridiculously high, post-COVID) would be a curse on the city. Like Hudson Yards, the 10 glass towers they propose are future slums of the sky. I shudder to think how badly they will age, compared to pre-war buildings of stone.
In defense of the streets, I say these grand structures deserve rehabilitation, not annihilation. The demolition of Penn Station is now acknowledged as New York’s greatest architectural crime. Bulldozing the remaining blocks around it would reopen the wound. New Yorkers are oblivious to the mass scale wrecking of Midtown in store if this plan goes through. The decision rests not in the hands of local citizens, but with Albany legislators.
I pray the entire Empire Station Complex is stopped cold. Private groups like ReThinkNYC and New Yorkers for a Human-Scale City have floated cheaper and better alternatives. Scrap the subsidies to Vornado, scrap the $16 billion in sketchy financing, dependent on the sale of air rights. Rebuild Penn Station as the center of a regional unified train network. Hopefully, one that would resemble the picturesque hub of a railroad, not a shopping mall. It is up to Albany to spare the city the insult of another hyper-developed, gentrified forest of glass towers.
Friedman, a musician and writer, is the author of “Tales of Times Square.”
