FIPS CARES: And Did You Know Penn Station Wasn't Always A Dump?

Photo by Aaron Rose courtesy of the MCNY

Little disclaimer: A version of this post ran on Untapped Cities yesterday to commemorate the 51st anniversary of Penn Station's demolition. It also ran to help promote the Kickstarter campaign for my show called The Eternal Space. My hope is that you'll read on and consider backing. We can use all the help we can get even a dollar or five bucks will get us one step closer to our goal. I promise it's a great show involving architecture, photography, NYC history and of course, Penn Station. Oh and we have really cool backer rewards. Check it out! If nothing else look at some of the amazing pics of Penn's demolition we turned up... Ok, onto the post...

51 years ago yesterday, construction crews pulled up to the 33^rd Street entrance to New York City’s Beaux-Arts marvel, Pennsylvania Station with orders to begin its three-year demolition. The station was only 53 years old and covered two full-city blocks, making it the largest indoor public space in the world. The bankrupt Pennsylvania Railroad was forced to sell their air rights prompting the company to move its rail operation down into an ill-conceived basement station barely a third the original station’s size. Any of you who have ever had to travel into or out of the current Penn Station know just what kind of hellhole it can be. 

Among many things, Penn’s destruction was a symbolic torch passing from the grandiose appreciation of the past to the austere simplicity of the future. As the New York Times so aptly put it in 1961,  “The Age of Elegance bowed to the Age of Plastic.”

Photo by Norman McGrath

Clearly, the story and conditions for Penn’s demolition formed all the necessary ingredients for a lavish stage drama: a magnificent structure succumbing to blind progress, the bankrupt railroad moguls acquiescing to the almighty dollar, and the small band of architects fighting to save the city from a civic and cultural crime. But all that was the furthest thing from my mind when I set out to write a play about it. 

In February 2001 I came across Peter Moore’s book (at B&N on 7th Ave) , The Destruction of Penn Station, a haunting photo-documentation of Penn’s demolition. To a young guy still trying to navigate 9-11’s senselessness, Moore’s photos made a crucial connection for me: we miss great buildings when they're taken from us. 

For me, born twelve years after the physical building was wiped off the map, Penn Station lived in Moore's meticulous 3-year photo documentation. He brought it to life as he captured it dying. 

Photo by Norman McGrath

When The Eternal Space took shape, its story wasn’t realized through a bombastic architect or an over-intellectualized urban planner bucking the system to keep the station standing. It came through the only person truly able to save Penn Station for future generations: a photographer (specifically, a fictional photographer who also works a day job as a construction worker taking down the station). 

With the show having only two characters, I envisioned photography as the third actor on stage. Indeed, I’d give the photographs their own stage directions in the script! In preparation for a showcase run, I was able to amass more than 1500 largely unseen Penn demolition photos from five unique and very talented photographers. You can learn much more about that by checking out the video on the Kickstarter page.

After the play was read last year at the AIANY’s Center for Architecture, renowned architectural photographer and Eternal Spacecollaborator Norman McGrath said, “Justin, I really enjoyed that. Finally a play about a photographer and photography. Well done!” That did my heart tremendous good. For the first time in 10 years, a photographer told me he appreciated the show from a photographer’s perspective.   

Sadly, the majority of us know the old Penn Station only from photos. In the case of Penn’s mythological demolition I would have been remiss to let the photographer’s story go unnoticed. I hope in a small way I was able shed some much-needed light on their incredible contributions.  

Should you be interested in helping The Eternal Space and the photos it is working to preserve reach a larger audience, please click through here and consider backing its Kickstarter campaign. Backer gifts include original demolition photographs by Norman McGrath and a Penn Station tour offered through Untapped Cities. We deeply appreciate your help. Please back now!