For the past month I've lived two blocks from Penn Station. In fact, I go through the 34th St Penn Station subway stop at least twice a day.
Midtown is such a barren wasteland of concreteness. Walking through the garment district feels like you're a tiny mouse in a gigantic grey maze. If you happen to be on 7th or 8th looking north or south, then you get blinded by the lights of MSG or times square. The entire environment is aggressively imposing and claustrophobic, and going underground into Penn Station is 10x worse. I've ridden the LIRR and NJ transit a few times now, and if I were to go in today I would still get lost.
One of the coolest things about Tokyo's train lines is the layers of walkways stacked vertically above roads and between other paths (e.g. shibuya), so that you're often looking into the shared space that's the big public intersection in the middle. It feels more open and there's trees.
Cool cities make you feel like you're part of something bigger, and a big factor of that is shared open public space. Penn station makes you feel like a pinball bouncing between turnstiles.
Midtown Manhattan is a sinfully ugly tourist trap, especially around Penn. I'd argue it's the worst neighborhood by far. It's a twinkle in tourist's eyes but I avoid it like the plague.
The thing about Penn too is that it's extremely difficult to calculate your bearings. There's no significant landmarks to orient yourself by - every corridor looks the same. I use Penn regularly and I occasionally get lost if I happen to use a different entrance.
I don't care about making midtown cool - there are plenty of cool areas in New York for me to spend my time. I want midtown to be efficient - if that means turning the entire thing into a perfectly square block of concrete, so be it. Penn Station needs to be so much better at one very simple job: getting people in and out of the city.
As a counterpoint, I'd recommend reading Alon Levy's blog post "Why the Focus On Penn Station?"[1]. The TL;DR is that the 650,000/day ridership number significantly overstates actual ridership, and includes subway ridership that wouldn't really benefit from most proposed improvements.
There are far better uses for transit funding in the NYC area. Even within Penn Station, the low-hanging fruit would come by improving the track level (wider platforms/fewer tracks), rather than the concourses.
If this piques your interest, Levy's "Eliminate Penn Station" proposal[2] is worth a read, although he admits it's somewhat trollish.
That's ridiculous. Excluding the subway, there's still approximately 110k riders each way on the LIRR[1] and 90k each way on NJ Transit[2]. Plus amtrak, you're talking about ~450,000 daily rail passengers. That would still make Penn Station one of the 3 busiest train stations in Europe, for context.
I have to agree. The destruction of the old Penn Station was a tragedy, but it is over and done with. We need to look forward to what the best use of resources is today for the people of NYC. And that's not a pretty building -- it's increased capacity, resiliency, and safety.
For comparison, the new (opened in 2006) Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main railway station) is a similar multilevel open space all the way down to the railway tracks at the bottom, all under a shell of glass walls and ceiling.
The Berlin Hauptbahnhof is good looking with good functionality. I was there recently and it looked like there was a new phase of construction starting, its also visible in the aerial shot in on one of you links. Any idea what those plans are?
That the old Penn Station was destroyed in 1963, in favor of what stands today really sounds like some kind of horrible urban planning debacle no one likes to think about or talk about anymore. But New York was a different place back then, or so I'm told.
Penn Station, the way it is now is just something you sort of shrug at, given the way Midtown is, in general.
Everything on 8th Avenue from 23rd Street to 59th Street is seedy and weird, but the creeps and transients really occupy a strip between 34th Street and 42nd Street.
I've always figured it was a legacy of The Old 42nd Street, from the 1970's. That place ancient New Yorkers still talk about, from a time before Giulliani's Disnified Times Square took root in the 90's, but honestly who knows.
Somtimes I wonder, though, if that part of town would be different now, if Madison Square Garden weren't there, and the original, grander Penn Station had still remained. Throughout the 20th century many other parts of Manhattan endured similar transformations, and even Grand Central went through a period of neglect, but to compare Grand Central to Penn Station now, is like night and day.
Midtown is a strange combination of seedy, dirty, weird, sketchy, and "cleaned up" tourist destinations. It's busy, full of massage parlors and bad souvenir stores, safe, and full of families on vacation. Probably my least favorite part of Manhattan to work in.
There is a silver lining however in that the destruction of the station precipitated the passage of the New York City landmarks law shortly after. Fun fact - Jackie Onasis was a high profile proponent of this legislation as well as raising awareness of architectural heritage in the city.
I'm never quite convinced. The ugliness of the present station apparently hasn't stopped it serving 3x as many passengers as it was designed for. Meanwhile Madison Square Garden has provided a lot of value to a lot of people over the years. Of course a pretty building is better than an ugly one, but not if it comes at the cost of a lot of space that could be used for something else.
Just a meta note about this article: I loved the swipeable before-and-after graphics. They really helped me understand the proposed design in a way that the words alone couldn't.
(BTW, I'm typing this from an Amtrak train bound for Penn Station, which has long been my least favorite place in Manhattan!)
I like this idea as much as I like some of the others I've heard over the years. I was a daily NJ Transit commuter for almost 8 years but am now down to twice a week. Upgrades to Penn Station are as needed as are upgrades to the rest of our nations infrastructure. But to me, therein lies the problem. Infrastructure. Something our country seems hellbent on destroying through neglect. I would love to see one of these big "fix Penn Station" projects be made into a reality and actually have the intended affect, but the cynical part of me (which seems to grow a bit every birthday) simply can't be brought to believe I'll see it happen anytime in the next couple decades.
To me Penn Station as it exists today is a prime example of how we've come to treat our vital infrastructure.
On an average morning it takes 5+ minutes to get off the platform because it's normal for two, or three, rush hour trains to be unloaded onto a single platform back-to-back which results in thousands of people trying to squeeze up four or five small staircases.
Looking around the platform the concrete is cracked, some of it creaks when you walk over it, there are huge chunks of concrete missing everywhere. Lights are constantly out, even when they're on its perpetually dark, everything is covered in a layer of filth.
The rest is the same. Cracked walls and ceilings. Filth, trash, stink, and overcrowding everywhere. Perpetually bad lighting. One good delay for any of the transit systems that converge under Penn and it becomes impossible to move as thousands of people stand around hoping for their train to arrive.
On the NJ Transit side track numbers aren't posted ahead of time. If you're lucky you might get ~10 minutes notice but during rush hour it's normal for tracks to be posted minutes before departure. So you get train fulls of people rushing back and forth to make it to the few stairs or escalators (which are usually going up even when trains down on the platform are boarding) to get to their train on time.
And despite all this Penn Station is vitally important to the area. NJ and NYC's economies benefit immeasurably from it. Even as far as Philadelphia, DC, and Boston. Yet, there it rots and crumbles. For decades. And the best we can do so far is hope for some more fancy computer renderings of something that maybe could make things better. And while we wait delays become more frequent, trains and stations get more crowded, things continue to fall apart, and the costs continue to rise.
Seattle just completed a much needed light rail extension north to the UW, and it's gorgeous. Construction only took three years, it works incredibly well, and it's not some ugly building meant to hide from view. It ends up adding a lot to the campus.
It's possible, but folks in NYC do seem more used to political inertia and cynical resignation.
This proposal looks beautiful, but a minor point stuck out for me. Putting large maps on the ceiling sounds like a terrible UX that will confuse people more than orient them.
You'll end up with one axis that corresponds to actual directions in the real world, while its perpendicular axis is exactly the opposite. If the "north" and "south" ends of the map are actually to the north and south, for example, east and west will be on the wrong sides.
If you put all four compass directions in their real-world locations, then the entire map is mirrored when seen from below. Maybe this rat's-eye-view of New York would be appropriate, but it would also be deeply unfamiliar and look like an enormous mistake.
There's a really good convention for public maps that are standing up on a sign (left and right correspond to what's to your left and right in the real world, and up corresponds to what's ahead of you), and there's a completely obvious convention for maps on the floor. There's no sensible convention for ceiling maps.
Sounds like a great way to get pickpocketed. Lots of disoriented travellers staring up at the ceiling. Then again, maybe it's no different from everyone staring at their phones ignoring the world around them.
As someone who hasn't been to New York in decades my main interaction with Penn Station has been the regular appearance of Amtrak's Kafkaesque Large Station Boarding Procedures as a whipping horse in Matt Yglesias blog posts [1, for example].Then I realized I hadn't seen one in awhile and maybe Amtrak changed to normal train boarding at major stations.
However, to Yglesias' post I'd add that, in all fairness, the underground platforms at Penn are really too narrow to have people waiting for the train on the platform and then heading into an assigned car as is common in Europe. So whether or not they checked the ticket at the top of the escalator in Penn, there would still be something of a crush as people went down to the platform from the very congested boarding area.
(What is a reasonable question is why Amtrak doesn't actually have reserved seating even on their "all reserved" trains like Acela.)
This is great. I took accela into Penn Station for 4 years from DC. I always wish they could revitalize that whole area. They can do so much with it. Today it's feels like a 3rd world train station.
I am not sure why everyone cares so much about flash infrastructure. I go to Penn Station to ride the train from time to time. It's fine. You can get a coffee down there. You buy a ticket and get on your train. It's not a work of art, it's not a beautiful space that inspires me to be excellent. But I don't expect it to be, it's a train station. I go there to get on the train.
Trump was droning on about this during the debate, how our airports make us look like a third-world country or something. I don't see why anyone cares. I've taken numerous flights in and out of Laguardia. You show up there, go through security, and get on an airplane. I am not looking for excitement or a work of art. It's an airport. I want to be in and out as quickly as possible.
I only want two transportation-related improvements -- more service so I can get a seat during the day and not wait around for 30 minutes at night, and positive train control so that I don't die when someone forgets to stop at the last station. Everything else is ego-driven money wasting. (I'm looking at you, Andrew Cuomo.)
Read icehawk's comment below regarding infrastructure. It's not the lack of works of art, architectural details, or coffee shops that's the issue. As an occasional rider you don't know, but the station hasn't scaled its ridership over the years. Coming up from the tracks or down to there, during rush hour or even a typical weekend, is a slow nightmare. Frequently commuters coming up and down colide and cause a deadlock, as there are no designated up and down areas. The layout is old. The station is large and poorly organized. I was in a very busy station with a bad rap in London a few weeks ago, called Victoria, and while the British complain about everything this station handles multiple commuter lines and several Tube lines with sophisticated aplomb. It's wide and open, like I see the new Penn design is intended to be.
It's not an issue of beauty, it's an issue of efficiency and scale. The infrastructure hasn't scaled.
LaGuardia's issue isn't its ugliness but its lack of efficiency: not enough seating, not enough A/C outlets, long waits to get through security, not enough bathrooms, dangerous triple-parked quick-rearrange-the-luggage-so-we-can-go pickup-and-dropoff areas.
The dinginess of the terminals and dearth of food/shopping options are really bad too, but the biggest problems in my opinion have to do with objective issues that any stoic efficiency expert would balk at.
You could take a similar utilitarian view of all structures, and come the the conclusion that there's no reason for anything to be beautiful or inspiring.
NYP is actually the perfect introduction to midtown and Manhattan in general. There are a ton of people moving quickly to a destination in a confusing maze of stuff that you can't find your way out of without asking somebody.
Realistically, we shouldn't build anything big in NY. The costs are out of control, insanely slow, and wildly unpredictable. No one even knows where the money goes.
What we should do is focus on a completing few small projects with time and budget constraints comparable to the rest of the world (e.g. Spain, Hong Kong or Delhi). This should be done with the goal of excluding all the current people who are robbing us blind (i.e. no MTA workers); bring in French, Japanese or Indian contractors as needed.
Once we can build and maintain a transit system at reasonable cost, then we should think about big projects. Until then, why throw good money after bad?
[+] [-] dluan|9 years ago|reply
Midtown is such a barren wasteland of concreteness. Walking through the garment district feels like you're a tiny mouse in a gigantic grey maze. If you happen to be on 7th or 8th looking north or south, then you get blinded by the lights of MSG or times square. The entire environment is aggressively imposing and claustrophobic, and going underground into Penn Station is 10x worse. I've ridden the LIRR and NJ transit a few times now, and if I were to go in today I would still get lost.
One of the coolest things about Tokyo's train lines is the layers of walkways stacked vertically above roads and between other paths (e.g. shibuya), so that you're often looking into the shared space that's the big public intersection in the middle. It feels more open and there's trees.
Cool cities make you feel like you're part of something bigger, and a big factor of that is shared open public space. Penn station makes you feel like a pinball bouncing between turnstiles.
[+] [-] vdnkh|9 years ago|reply
The thing about Penn too is that it's extremely difficult to calculate your bearings. There's no significant landmarks to orient yourself by - every corridor looks the same. I use Penn regularly and I occasionally get lost if I happen to use a different entrance.
[+] [-] untog|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexhutcheson|9 years ago|reply
There are far better uses for transit funding in the NYC area. Even within Penn Station, the low-hanging fruit would come by improving the track level (wider platforms/fewer tracks), rather than the concourses.
If this piques your interest, Levy's "Eliminate Penn Station" proposal[2] is worth a read, although he admits it's somewhat trollish.
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/quic... [2] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/elim...
[+] [-] hammerzeit|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://transitdocs.com/files/data/lirr/2012RidershipBook.pdf [2] http://www.njtransit.com/pdf/FactsAtaGlance.pdf
[+] [-] bradleyjg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] typetypetype|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sampo|9 years ago|reply
http://architektur.mapolismagazin.com/sites/default/files/be...
http://tfrisch.de/wp-content/gallery/u55-berlin/HBF%20Berlin...
http://www.e-architect.co.uk/images/jpgs/berlin/berlin_haupt...
http://awesomeberlin.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/hauptbah...
[+] [-] bogomipz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavement|9 years ago|reply
Penn Station, the way it is now is just something you sort of shrug at, given the way Midtown is, in general.
Everything on 8th Avenue from 23rd Street to 59th Street is seedy and weird, but the creeps and transients really occupy a strip between 34th Street and 42nd Street.
I've always figured it was a legacy of The Old 42nd Street, from the 1970's. That place ancient New Yorkers still talk about, from a time before Giulliani's Disnified Times Square took root in the 90's, but honestly who knows.
Somtimes I wonder, though, if that part of town would be different now, if Madison Square Garden weren't there, and the original, grander Penn Station had still remained. Throughout the 20th century many other parts of Manhattan endured similar transformations, and even Grand Central went through a period of neglect, but to compare Grand Central to Penn Station now, is like night and day.
I figure there's something to that.
[+] [-] cfmcdonald|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...
Was destroyed to make way for this rat warren:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(New_York...
[+] [-] sotojuan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogomipz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helloworld|9 years ago|reply
(BTW, I'm typing this from an Amtrak train bound for Penn Station, which has long been my least favorite place in Manhattan!)
[+] [-] icehawk219|9 years ago|reply
To me Penn Station as it exists today is a prime example of how we've come to treat our vital infrastructure.
On an average morning it takes 5+ minutes to get off the platform because it's normal for two, or three, rush hour trains to be unloaded onto a single platform back-to-back which results in thousands of people trying to squeeze up four or five small staircases.
Looking around the platform the concrete is cracked, some of it creaks when you walk over it, there are huge chunks of concrete missing everywhere. Lights are constantly out, even when they're on its perpetually dark, everything is covered in a layer of filth.
The rest is the same. Cracked walls and ceilings. Filth, trash, stink, and overcrowding everywhere. Perpetually bad lighting. One good delay for any of the transit systems that converge under Penn and it becomes impossible to move as thousands of people stand around hoping for their train to arrive.
On the NJ Transit side track numbers aren't posted ahead of time. If you're lucky you might get ~10 minutes notice but during rush hour it's normal for tracks to be posted minutes before departure. So you get train fulls of people rushing back and forth to make it to the few stairs or escalators (which are usually going up even when trains down on the platform are boarding) to get to their train on time.
And despite all this Penn Station is vitally important to the area. NJ and NYC's economies benefit immeasurably from it. Even as far as Philadelphia, DC, and Boston. Yet, there it rots and crumbles. For decades. And the best we can do so far is hope for some more fancy computer renderings of something that maybe could make things better. And while we wait delays become more frequent, trains and stations get more crowded, things continue to fall apart, and the costs continue to rise.
[+] [-] dluan|9 years ago|reply
It's possible, but folks in NYC do seem more used to political inertia and cynical resignation.
(http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/03/25/geology-and-art-co...)
[+] [-] rspeer|9 years ago|reply
You'll end up with one axis that corresponds to actual directions in the real world, while its perpendicular axis is exactly the opposite. If the "north" and "south" ends of the map are actually to the north and south, for example, east and west will be on the wrong sides.
If you put all four compass directions in their real-world locations, then the entire map is mirrored when seen from below. Maybe this rat's-eye-view of New York would be appropriate, but it would also be deeply unfamiliar and look like an enormous mistake.
There's a really good convention for public maps that are standing up on a sign (left and right correspond to what's to your left and right in the real world, and up corresponds to what's ahead of you), and there's a completely obvious convention for maps on the floor. There's no sensible convention for ceiling maps.
[+] [-] RockyMcNuts|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coleca|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fumplethumb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.vox.com/2014/3/31/5563600/everything-you-need-to-...
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
However, to Yglesias' post I'd add that, in all fairness, the underground platforms at Penn are really too narrow to have people waiting for the train on the platform and then heading into an assigned car as is common in Europe. So whether or not they checked the ticket at the top of the escalator in Penn, there would still be something of a crush as people went down to the platform from the very congested boarding area.
(What is a reasonable question is why Amtrak doesn't actually have reserved seating even on their "all reserved" trains like Acela.)
[+] [-] wodahs02|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|9 years ago|reply
Trump was droning on about this during the debate, how our airports make us look like a third-world country or something. I don't see why anyone cares. I've taken numerous flights in and out of Laguardia. You show up there, go through security, and get on an airplane. I am not looking for excitement or a work of art. It's an airport. I want to be in and out as quickly as possible.
I only want two transportation-related improvements -- more service so I can get a seat during the day and not wait around for 30 minutes at night, and positive train control so that I don't die when someone forgets to stop at the last station. Everything else is ego-driven money wasting. (I'm looking at you, Andrew Cuomo.)
[+] [-] mancerayder|9 years ago|reply
It's not an issue of beauty, it's an issue of efficiency and scale. The infrastructure hasn't scaled.
[+] [-] humanrebar|9 years ago|reply
The dinginess of the terminals and dearth of food/shopping options are really bad too, but the biggest problems in my opinion have to do with objective issues that any stoic efficiency expert would balk at.
[+] [-] cfmcdonald|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TYPE_FASTER|9 years ago|reply
At least there's a Taco Bell.
[+] [-] yolesaber|9 years ago|reply
Manhattan above Houston St is basically a grid with an X/Y street / ave system. It's really not that confusing nor a maze
[+] [-] chiph|9 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/sep/16/liege-g...
http://www.e-architect.co.uk/belgium/liege-guillemins-tgv-st...
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|9 years ago|reply
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/mtas-costs-loom-large-14688...
What we should do is focus on a completing few small projects with time and budget constraints comparable to the rest of the world (e.g. Spain, Hong Kong or Delhi). This should be done with the goal of excluding all the current people who are robbing us blind (i.e. no MTA workers); bring in French, Japanese or Indian contractors as needed.
Once we can build and maintain a transit system at reasonable cost, then we should think about big projects. Until then, why throw good money after bad?
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lstyls|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virgil_disgr4ce|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toxican|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polpo|9 years ago|reply