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Pennsylvania Station is one of New York City 's main railway stations, sharing the '' Pennsylvania Station '' name with several stations in other cities. Commonly known as '''Penn Station''', it is located in the underground levels of Pennsylvania Plaza , an urban complex located at 32nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in Manhattan . Madison Square Garden is located atop the station. The name comes from its original owner, the Pennsylvania Railroad . Penn Station is located at the center of the Northeast Corridor , an Electrified Passenger Railroad line extending from Washington, DC to Boston, Massachusetts . The station is served (used) by a number of passenger Rail Service s including Amtrak (the station's owner), Long Island Rail Road , New Jersey Transit and the New York City Subway which does not actually share tracks into Penn Station, but has two stations at the eastern and western ends, with direct entrances in and out the concourse. PATH has a station a block east at 6th Avenue & West 33rd Street. The station is assigned the IATA Airport Code of ZYP. {Link without Title} Its Amtrak station code is NYP. HISTORY Enabling Penn Station is named for the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), its builder and original tenant. There could have been no Penn Station in New York City until the Pennsylvania Railroad's rails reached Manhattan. The 19th Century PRR did not; it terminated across the Hudson River in Jersey City 's Exchange Place terminal, where passengers bound for Manhattan boarded ferries for the final stretch of their journey. The rival New York Central Railroad's rails ran down Manhattan from the north, ending in its Grand Central Terminal right in the heart of Midtown Manhattan . The Pennsylvania Railroad, unsatisfied with this state of affairs, considered Bridging the Hudson River (too expensive) or Tunnel ing under it (too long to work with Steam Locomotive s and too difficult to ventilate). The development of the Electric Locomotive and Electrified Railroad Systems by the early 20th Century provided a practicable solution to the latter problem. On December 12 , 1901 , PRR president Alexander Cassatt announced the railroad's plan to enter New York City, to tunnel under the Hudson and to build a grand station on the West Side of Manhattan, south of Thirty-Fourth Street. The PRR had been secretly buying up the land in Manhattan and New Jersey that it needed for some time. ]] Two single-track tunnels were bored from the New Jersey side, and in addition four single-track tunnels were bored under the East River from Queens to Manhattan, linking the Long Island Rail Road , now under PRR control, to the new station (see East River Tunnels ). Sunnyside Yard in Queens would be the place where trains were maintained and assembled. The tunnel technology was so new and innovative that the PRR shipped an actual 23 foot diameter section of the new East River Tunnel to the Jamestown Exposition at Sewell's Point on Hampton Roads , near Norfolk, Virginia in 1907 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown Settlement . The same tube, with an inscription that it had been displayed at the Exposition, was later installed under water, and was still in use in 2004. Construction The current facility is the substantially remodelled underground remnant of a much grander structure built between 1905 and 1910 . Designed by Charles McKim of the famous architectural firm of McKim, Mead, And White , the original Pennsylvania Station of legend was an outstanding masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the architectural jewels of New York City. The above-ground portion of the original structure was demolished in the mid 1960s to make room for the current Pennsylvania Plaza / Madison Square Garden complex. The original structure was a pink- Granite exercise in a gigantic and sober Colonnade d Doric Order embodying the sophisticated integration of multiple functions and circulation of people and goods that is an under-appreciated achievement of the outwardly glamorous and occasionally pompous Beaux-Arts movement. McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Station combined frank glass-and-steel train sheds and a magnificently-proportioned concourse with a breath-taking monumental entrance to New York City, immortalized in films (see link below). From the street, twin carriageways, modelled after Berlin's Brandenburg Gate , led to the two railroads that the building served, the Pennsylvania and the Long Island Rail Road. The main waiting room, inspired by the Roman Baths Of Caracalla , approximated the scale of St. Peter's nave in Rome, expressed here in a steel framework clad in Travertine . The destruction of the original structure -- although considered by some to be justified as progressive in the trade at the time, and largely ignored by non-professional Americans -- nevertheless left a deep and lasting wound in the architectural consciousness of the city. A famous photograph of a smashed Caryatid in the landfill of the Meadowlands struck a guilty chord. Pennsylvania Station's destruction is considered to have been the catalyst for the enactment of the city's first architectural Preservation statutes. The sculpture on the building, including the angel in the landfill, was created by Adolph Alexander Weinman . One of the sculpted clock surrounds, whose figures were modeled using model Audrey Munson , still survives as the Eagle Scout Memorial Fountain in Kansas City, Missouri , there is also a caryatid at the sculpture garden at the Brooklyn Museum , and all of the Penn Station eagles are still in existence. Ironically, Charles McKim may have doomed his own structure by not allowing Alexander Cassatt to include multi-story office buildings as part of the Penn Station complex. By the 1960's, the air rights of Penn Station were too valuable to be left idle and the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was losing money at the time, would have had one less incentive to tear down the beautiful building. McKim opposed high rises because he considered them anti-urban. Ottawa's Union Station , built a year after Penn Station (in 1912) is another replica of the Baths Of Caracalla . Therefore, this train station's departures hall now provides, at half the scale, a good idea of what the interior of Penn Station would have looked like. Chicago's Union Station is similar as well. Destruction After a renovation covered some of the grand columns with plastic and blocked off the spacious central hallway with a new ticket office, Lewis Mumford wrote critically in the '' New Yorker '' in 1958 that "nothing further that could be done to the station could damage it". History was to prove him wrong. Under the presidency of Pennsylvania Railroad's Stuart T. Saunders (who later headed ill-fated Penn Central Transportation ), the above-ground components of this structure (the platforms are below street level) were demolished in 1964 , without disrupting the essential day-to-day operations, to make way for present-day Madison Square Garden , along with two office towers. Four eagles salvaged from the station currently reside on the Market Street Bridge in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania across from that city's 30th Street Station . Another is located at the Long Island Rail Road station in Hicksville, New York . The demolition of such a well-known landmark, and its replacement by a mediocre slab of real estate, were widely deplored, and are often cited as catalysts for the architectural preservation movement in the United States, and for laws restricting such demolition. Within the decade, Grand Central Terminal was protected under the city's new landmarks preservation act -- a protection which was upheld by the courts in 1978, after a challenge by Grand Central's owner, Penn Central. The outcry over the loss of Penn Station prompted activists to question the "development scheme" mentality that was also cultivated by New York's "master builder", Robert Moses (although the cash-strapped railroad, not Moses, was actually responsible for the demolition). Moses' plans for a Lower Manhattan Expressway were scrapped due to public protests and a rejection of the plan by the city government. In the longer run, the sense that something irreplaceable had been lost contributed to the erosion of confidence in Modernism itself and its sweeping forms of Urban Renewal , and thus strengthened interest in Historic Preservation . Comparing the new and the old Penn Station, architectural historian Vincent Scully once wrote, "One entered the city like a god, one scuttles in now like a rat." Future The current Pennsylvania Station is often criticized for its charmlessness, especially when compared to the much larger yet less used Grand Central Terminal . That image comes even with owner Amtrak and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority 's renovation work in the 1990s that vastly improved the look of the waiting/concession areas, sharpened the station information systems (audio and visual) and removed much of the grime. (The 34th Street Long Island Rail Road entrance features an old four-sided clock from the original depot, and the walkway from its escalator has a mural with elements alluding to the old Penn Station's architecture.) But hope for a grander railroad terminal lies just one block west. Across 8th Avenue from Penn Station sits New York's General Post Office, the James Farley Post Office . Under pressure from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan , plans were publicized in 1999 to move entrances and concourses of Penn Station under this building, which fills an entire city block. The newly completed structure will be named Moynihan Station in the Senator's honor. 1 Initial design proposals were laid out by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings, And Merrill . In a rather uncomfortable series of events reminiscent of the continuous redesign of the Freedom Tower (also by Childs), the project schedule had been stretched further and further into the future. As of July 2005, it was announced that Childs' plan had been scrapped, and a new one was unveiled. This new plan is similar, though somewhat more modest than the original and is the result of a collaboration between the architectural firms of James Carpenter and Hellmuth, Obata And Kassabaum (HOK). Amtrak was to be the major tenant of the buiilding, leaving the old staion for use by the local commuter passengers. Signs of construction appeared in November 2005, with plywood barriers installed on the sidewalks and orange nets covering main Facade on 8th Avenue. 2 Amtrak, however, has pulled out, and New Jersey Transit is to become the Moynihan Station's anchor tenant. NJ Transit is apparently in the process of negotiating a 99-year lease on the Farley Post Office {Link without Title} In the meantime, a movement of Madison Square Garden to the west flank of the Farley Building is being contemplated by Cablevision , owner of the Garden, and such a movement could lead to Vornado Realty Trust building an office complex on the current Garden site [http://www.cpnonline.com/cpn/regions/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002033602 . Unfortunately, news reports are vague as to the exact whereabouts of the proposed new Madison Square Garden and what is to be done to the Farley building, other than preserving the facade (work is already underway on the facade preservation; scaffolding is up and the Empire State Development Corporation is looking for advertisers for that scaffolding {Link without Title} . RAILWAYS, LINES, AND TRAINS Amtrak
MTA Long Island Rail Road (to Jamaica Station and points east) Subway stations at Penn Station
New York City Subway lines:
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