BRILLIANCE, FOR A DIAMOND, requires an abundance of facets, prismatic clarity, and a good polish. Never has the Port Authority Bus Terminal (PABT), which turns seventy-five in 2025, been compared to a diamond. But it could be considered a rougher sort of gem: one that is waiting to be planed, sawed, buffed up. This surface-rich labyrinth is capable of inducing dream states in which a brave visitor can imagine taking the wrong escalator to a cold, fluorescent hell or, just as easily, a pleasant commuter pub for midweek pints.
The layout of the 1.9-million-square-foot bus terminal follows the romantic logic of bureaucracy—that of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a once stridently autonomous body with huge designs on the city and region now stymied by chronic unprofitability and frosty relations with Albany. To my mind, the maze of levels and passageways aces the complexity that separates the absurdity of New York from the absurdity of anywhere else. These convolutions have sirened many to the city, mostly from out of state, which is to say Jersey. In the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan, Madonna’s titular, itinerary character spends a lot of time mewing on escalators or freshening up in bathrooms, with Roseanna Arquette (as a terminally bored Fort Lee housewife) following in close pursuit. Not much about the place has changed since all of New York looked like a big utility sink that Madonna could wash her shoes in.
The authority has ginned up interest in a wholesale replacement overseen by Foster + Partners through a time-tested strategy: negging.
Unlike the Port Authority, which, despite frittering away its influence on excessive speculative development, a reputation for inefficiency, and calls for its restructuring, continues to persist, the Midtown bus terminal really is on its last legs. Completed in 1950 on land cleared of forty buildings and six hundred families for the undertaking, PABT wrangled the West Side’s haphazard arrangement of bus depots that sprang up after the Lincoln Tunnel opened in 1937 into a vertical coil. Revenue was partly generated by extracting fees from captive charters, but the bulk of income came from retail tenants that included the city’s largest supermarket at the time. The art deco pile, which filled the Fortieth Street block between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, nested radius curves and hard edges in what a newsletter for the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects described as “a most interesting three-dimensional essay in handling many people and many vehicles at many levels—three-dimensional with a vengeance.”
In the early 1980s, Port Authority architects authored an unsympathetic expansion over and on Forty-First Street that smothered the deco antecedent and introduced hammy steel X-bracing to support a dilated garage deck. (The AIA Journal judged the project to be “not dainty, but just fine.”) But the mean, flinty trusses failed to ward off Times Square’s undesirable calling card: crime, prostitution, and homelessness. Intended to bolster a wider neighborhood redevelopment, PABT found itself shut out of the coalition struck up between real estate, historical preservation, and Disney that would go on to remake Times Square. The terminal’s municipal late modernism felt increasingly like a relic and was already out of date when Desperately Seeking Susan was filmed on the premises.
Port Authority Bus Terminal Ben Nadler
The subsequent decades brought decline and constant promises to remedy it. A long-standing proposal to build an office tower above the bus terminal that would have filled the Port Authority’s coffers through the sale of air rights was finally scrapped in 2011. More recently, the authority has ginned up interest in a wholesale replacement overseen by Foster + Partners through a time-tested strategy: negging. In a press release touting the $10 billion proposal, which was approved by the City Planning Commission in October, with the Federal Transit Administration following suit in December, the authority pledges to take things from “eyesore to eye-popping.” The statement was followed by a litany of goodies—enhanced capacity for larger buses, plus the vague assurance that those buses will be all-electric; net zero emissions; a light-filled atrium; thousands of union jobs.
In comparison, the Oculus at the World Trade Center seems like a steal. Owned and operated by the Port Authority, the Santiago Calatrava–wrought white elephant had, with a price tag of almost $4 billion, been the poster child of pecuniary mismanagement. (Infamously, that inflated budget allotted some $655 million for “administrative costs.”) Walking through the Oculus, I often become nauseated, the architecture’s beatific affect inducing a vision of heaven in a place that is in fact a hell. And sometimes, it’s better for our hells to look like hells.
THE PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL is the busiest depot of its kind in the world, yet it’s an afterthought for most New Yorkers. This is correct, since the vast majority of the 260,000 people who pass through it on a typical day are from New Jersey. Today, flagging retail outlets don’t come anywhere near pulling their weight. Mounting operational expenditures have led to intractable problems ranging from frequent irregularities in transit service to the physical neglect of the terminal itself. While Holden Caulfield sleeps securely on Grand Central’s main concourse, the ground floor of PABT makes for a far more delinquent bed when the late-night Greyhound is canceled.
TripAdvisor’s About page for the Port Authority Bus Terminal suggests that the average visit to the transportation hub should not exceed an hour. So, in an effort to have a bad time, I decided to spend as much time there as possible.
I arrive on the A train at 5:52 a.m., entering via the NorthWing. The first thing I notice are the overhead lights. PABT is a bricklaid cave, bereft of windows and immune to circadian time. The lack of daylight gives the whole building the demeanor of a basement fight club; the blue light seeping from the Greyhound ticket office reminds me that without a natural light source, every simulated attempt hurts. The reflective sparkle of the first of several Hudson News vendors, where you can pick up Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (2000) or Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto (2023) and a soft red orangutan plushy for $24.99, adds to my disorientation.
At points, the dull chocolate passages of the interior are augmented with more fake-bronze finish than a shopping mall full of spring breakers. They’re there in the ceiling eaves, which trace the arc of circulation cores, and on the sides of stairs and escalators, including those that lead to the main concourse upstairs. The airiness of the two-story hall, somehow accentuated by the space-frame halogen-lighting arrays, is a cheap relief. The Port Authority, which operates its own police department across its properties, maintains a precinct on-site, and evidence of its casual hostility is everywhere. A sign plastered on an already locked door warns, in the smallest of type, that “violators will be prosecuted.” Another notice, guarding a low-lit corner, informs me that “this area is closed due to police activity.” A yellow metal barricade appears to guard nothing at all. Down an escalator and past a 9/11 memorial, a poster headlined “The Faces of Global Terrorism” shows exactly what you would expect. In the recent past, these exclusionary zones have cordoned off migrants—bused in from Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott ordered a mass deportation to New York—to be deposited in the city without adequate provision for their care. These traces of policing activity appear and disappear into the maze, leaving behind a shifting trail of ropes, ramparts, and easy-to-overlook interdictions.
In front of the yellow barricade is George Rhoads’s 1983 42nd Street Ballroom, a Rube Goldberg–esque sculpture measuring eight feet by eight feet that would go over well with train enthusiasts. The mechanical rhythm of the apparatus is hollow and brusque, a symphonic version of the bellow of the subway, which would have made sense, except that the terminal does not contain any trains— and buses only make those sounds before they break down on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Walking through the Oculus, I often become nauseated, the architecture’s beatific affect inducing a vision of heaven in a place that is in fact a hell. And sometimes, it’s better for our hells to look like hells.
By visitor count alone, the Port Authority Bus Terminal is probably New York City’s most trafficked cultural space. And at this intersection of art and transit overseen by the building’s own “manager of film entertainment and cultural arts,” Myron Johnson, anything goes. This past summer, the kitschy magical futurism of Cosmic Reveries, an exhibition of watercolors and digital paintings by Fahad Sinan that equates straphangers to penguins, attempted to enliven the subway thruways. In a pocket gallery on the second level through the fall, the photographer Alan “Battman” Batt—whose output ranges from beefcakes for his (unauthorized) New York Fire Department calendar to food porn—hung portraits of sultry amuse-bouches at odd angles. This year, the Six Summit Gallery has been hosting painter John Grande’s show There’s No Meaning to Any of This at one of its three galleries inside the terminal, though when I peer inside (the door is locked), I wonder if the space itself is just a sculpture of what a gallery is supposed to be. I got a similar impression scanning the lifeless performance arts stage that’s situated atop a dead Au Bon Pain in the South Wing. (Crisscrossing the pair of blocks is fairly seamless, enabling a pleasurable drift that could, in theory at least, outlast an hour.)
Those looking for less high-minded divertissements can head to the bowling alley, which can only be accessed by exiting the building and reentering at the corner of Ninth and Fortieth. On a long walk outside the building, I notice a mural of dolphins frolicking in the sea and ask myself if I’m really in Tampa. Inside the bowling alley, it’s loud and C-list clubbish. Lanes go for $80. Families and couples bowl while a DJ spins in an enclosed booth; I peer inside, and he glares at me. In the next room over, a corporate outing has opted for karaoke. In the hallway that connects these two activities, sing-along Taylor Swift and a chopped “Snap Yo Fingers” collide to reassure us that there will still be genre smashing in the underworld.
A long day’s bus station art crawl over and homebound commuting traffic picks up. I’m drinking with my friend Dan at McAnn’s up on the second level of the South Wing. In this popular Irish pub that inexplicably lacks a bathroom, things feel almost normal. Comfortably dark and reliably crowded, this is one of the only outposts of the station that anyone might ever want to spend any time in. Where will commuters be able to mix and mingle in the redesigned Port Authority Bus Terminal if not under McAnn’s cork tile ceiling?
IN THE LATEST BATCH of renderings, the Port Authority Bus Terminal’s forlorn frontage along Eighth Avenue has been superseded by a light-filled public concourse; the dark Forty-First Street underpass, nearly always lined with off-duty taxis, becomes a front door—or an “iconic atrium entrance,” according to the authority’s description. Those giant X’s are gone, as are the billboards currently affixed to them. The garage decks have disappeared behind unblemished expanses of beveled and ribbed steel. There is green space, plus plentiful opportunities for shopping and the displaying of art—not the mutually exclusive activities we like to think they are. It looks like a much nicer place to be.
But something happens when things get nice, as can be observed at the Oculus or Moynihan Train Hall, another transit hub that really just wants to be an Apple store. The kaleidoscopic experience of being in a public space is laminated into a shiny playground for brand activation. The many facets of life in the city are buffed away; the infelicity of odd angles gives way to straight, easy lines. The mystery of how point A leads to point B is dispelled.
The death of the old Port Authority Bus Terminal, in other words, smooths out the stowaway spaces where we get to feel something as pleasurable as annoyance, as helpful as getting a little bit bored and lost. In place of one hell arises a pacifier heaven, where everything is for sale and nothing ever happens.