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…