At the start of the year, fewer people than ever were riding the train into and out of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station. Claustrophobic and artificially lit, with a uniquely asphyxiating air about it, Penn Station is the last place anyone wants to be in a pandemic. But just across Eighth Avenue, a new train hall attracted New Yorkers from all over, inviting them to momentarily shed their protective lockdown shells and soak up what we once recognized as “city life.”
Moynihan Train Hall opened on January 1 to a buzz that rarely accompanies new works of public architecture. The press was awash with praise about Moynihan’s bright and airy, classic-yet-modern, grand-but-not-austere—in a word, sunny— disposition. The project, which significantly adapts the Farley Post Office Building, has been over 25 years in the making, since it was first proposed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but its carefully choreographed press rollout would seem to backdate those origins to the turn of the last century; that is, to a time of great public architecture, premodern Beaux Arts craftsmanship, and a well-maintained train system. In the midst of declining confidence in the state and the country’s handling of the pandemic, it’s a story people were eager to hear.
And Moynihan Hall’s great champion, Governor Andrew Cuomo, was more than happy to give it to them. Sensing an opportunity to project the administrative competency that has hitherto eluded it, his team deftly incorporated Moynihan’s opening into a wider narrative of pandemic recovery. Speaking to the press in late December, Cuomo condensed the project’s protracted inception into a single flashpoint: “We built this as a statement of who we are, and who we aspire to be. Is it grand? Yes. Is it bold? Yes, because that is the spirit of New York and that is the statement we want to make to our visitors, to our children and to future generations. As dark as 2020 has been, this new hall will bring the light, literally and figuratively, for everyone who visits this great city.”
He is right about that: the hall, now used to sort Amtrak and LIRR passengers instead of mail, is very bright. During the day, the concourse is flooded with sun, thanks to the vaulted skylights supported by steel trusses original to the building. (Enormous LED screens add even more brightness.) The floor is sparse and seatless, interrupted only by the escalators leading down to the tracks. An analogue, Art Deco-ish timepiece acts as a natural meeting point for selfies. The few other passages of the Farley Building accessible by the public are pleasant enough to walk through, and prominent advertisements showing happy people dining and shopping promise a lively public place somewhere in a post-pandemic future.
Moynihan’s greatest strength, however, is rhetorical. The project script as rewritten by the governor’s office, and embellished by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), rests entirely on a meretricious comparison. Moynihan, says SOM partner Colin Koop, calls back to the “majesty of the original Penn Station, all while serving as a practical solution to the issues that commuters in, to and from New York have endured for too long.” On the question of matching the grandeur of McKim, Mead and White’s 1910 design (which was none too shy about making dubious historical comparisons itself), critical consensus was mixed but hardly condemnatory. With all the ways the elder Penn Station has been mythologized, the task of re-creating its architectural splendor is near impossible. Provided this, Moynihan’s flaws could easily be forgiven, and anyway, its optimism simply could not be denied at a moment when Covid-19 cases were reaching their peak.
The train system is still crumbling, the homeless have been quietly shuffled away to the less-grand parts of the new hall, and the success of on-time completion had less to do with a revival of a jobs-creating public program than it did with the high-pressure levied on private developers by the governor’s office.
But Koop’s claim that Moynihan represents a “practical” and timely solution must be rejected out of hand. For a supposed improvement to the city’s biggest transit hub (Moynihan is technically a branch of Penn Station), the project offers little in the way of tangible improvements. There was no increase in train capacity, overcrowded platforms weren’t widened, and the narrow escalators are no more efficient for egress and ingress than those currently serving the other parts of the station. Train riders are likely to bypass Moynihan altogether, since only a small section of the underground tracks actually reaches it. On the whole, the new train hall fails to act the part, though if we consider Cuomo’s $306 billion infrastructure plan, which promises to overhaul the remainder of Penn Station and Midtown Manhattan’s image along with it, then we arrive at Moynihan’s true purpose. Rather than a solution, it functions as a proof of concept for the governor’s overweening vision.
Since the measurable transit improvements are sparse for now, critics have been left to ponder the more intangible aspects of the project. Many have parsed out its meaning by invoking its namesake. “The building that now bears Moynihan’s name,” Ian Volner wrote in the New Yorker, “is a reassertion of his political and cultural values.” For Karrie Jacobs writing in Architect, the station is a poignant reminder of the senator’s advocacy of public space; it will have succeeded, she concludes, if it “helps restore even a little of the public trust that’s been squandered in recent years.” The Times’ Michael Kimmelman was more laconic, if no less purple: “Change can happen. Moynihan is a start.” Amid these and other appraisals, there is a pervading sense that something has been lost from the past—beautiful buildings, yes, but also a different set of values—that Moynihan Train Hall might help recover.
It is the station’s nostalgic function that appears to vault it into higher critical esteem than other recent, similarly scaled transit projects that were received lukewarmly. (Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Oculus comes to mind.) Moynihan gains immeasurably by its proximity to the ground zero of the preservation movement. After the original Penn Station—an eight-acre Beaux-Arts cathedral with high ceilings and a forest of columns—was set to be demolished in the early 1960s, Philip Johnson, Jane Jacobs, and other self-styled oppositional figures organized under the banner of the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York to press for the building to be spared. In its focus on architecture, however, the group inadvertently shifted the onus away from municipal and federal government and placed it onto architects, whose position in the city’s cultural fundament was slipping. The problem wasn’t that federal funding was being redirected from public transit to car infrastructure, but that architects were no longer valued nor trusted to inspire public confidence.
To its boosters, Moynihan Train Hall restores that confidence. Yet for all its posturing to the past, it will surely fail to placate the most orthodox preservationists and classicists, who would prefer the “real” thing. Among the many plans to fix Penn Station, ranging from the pragmatic to the ridiculously speculative, there’s the ongoing effort by the National Civic Art Society to demolish Madison Square Garden and the existing Penn Station beneath it and rebuild the station exactly as it was. Of course, to return to that way of building would necessitate a sea change in the construction industry; large-scale masonry is long out of practice, and the need for specialized craftsmanship would almost certainly open up the project to labor-related delays and huge cost overruns. For the more moderate preservationists, the existence of another McKim, Mead & White building right across the street was the next best thing. The vintage of the place would imbue a new construction with the requisite grandeur, while also obviating the need to reopen the quarries.
Moynihan’s greatest strength, however, is rhetorical. The project script as rewritten by the governor’s office, and embellished by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, rests entirely on a meretricious comparison to the specter of the demolished Penn Station.
As a sort of a modern interpolation of Beaux Arts eclecticism, Moynihan Train Hall reaches less to antiquity for inspiration than to the canon of styles that evoke old New York. For what traditional design elements there are, such as the retro clock and the steel trusses or the modern-ish wooden benches (for ticketed riders only), are old-fashioned in a generic sense—instantly accessible and impossible to place within any specific historic period. SOM, whose recent New York output can hardly be accused of subtlety, has created the perfect venue for all sorts of ham-fisted civic pride. One struggles to find a corner where to take refuge from the barrage of “New York” branding, or the specter of the old Penn Station. The waiting area is decorated with Stan Douglas’s Penn Station’s Half Century, a series of wall-sized photographs that eerily place models dressed in period costume within a digitally resurrected Penn Station. The wall along the baggage claim area recounts, in huge graphics, the history of Penn Station. A profuse Senator Moynihan quote—describing, in 2002, the train hall to come—sums up the self-congratulatory mood of the place: “In the old time, you arrived at Pennsylvania Station at the train platform. You went up the stairs to heaven. Make that Manhattan. And we shall have it again. Praise all.”
But there are plenty of reasons for withholding our praise. The train system is still crumbling, the homeless have been quietly shuffled away to the less-grand parts of the new hall, and the success of on-time completion had less to do with a revival of a jobs-creating public program than it did with the high-pressure levied on private developers by the governor’s office. Ironically, but tellingly, Cuomo invoked FDR when, in mid-January, he announced plans to extend the High Line to Moynihan Hall. Roosevelt, he suggested, “believed in building large infrastructure projects to lift the economy, but there was another purpose, which was to lift people’s spirits. If you lift the spirits, you lift the economy.”
Unlike the trains now operating at austerity levels of service, the train hall itself has arrived exactly on time, ready to uplift. But pretty buildings alone won’t bring back New Deal–style social democracy. Moynihan Train Hall is a nice consolation prize for a commuter now returning to their recently reopened midtown office, but its primary function is ideological. In lieu of tangible fixes to the issues that plague public transit in New York City, we are offered a redemption tale worthy of Broadway.