Rebirth of a Gateway

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, my late father and for 24 years New York’s Senator, spent over a decade championing a modern Pennsylvania Station for New York City. As a child during the Great Depression, he sold newspapers and shined shoes in the old Penn Station. As a Senator, he secured federal, state and city funds and guided an initial architectural plan to rebuild the station in the adjacent James A. Farley Post Office. Following Moynihan’s death in 2003, Senator Charles E. Schumer and Governor George E. Pataki proposed re-naming the facility Moynihan Station to honor the Senator from Hell’s Kitchen.

This final, unfinished piece of my father’s legacy unites landmark preservation, infrastructure, urban planning, transportation policy, architecture, design and economic development in service to the common good. It is a unique public works project that will yield tangible benefits for every citizen of our region. And it will revive a critical swath of midtown Manhattan, for too long blighted by the destruction of the original Penn Station some forty years ago.

The decision to raze Penn Station was made in private boardrooms and finalized by the City Planning Commission. Many alarmed citizens protested with vigor and eloquence, but the commission ruled in favor of the proposed value, not the existing value of the site. The civic groups were swiftly defeated and on October 28th, 1963, a rainy Monday morning, the destruction of Penn Station commenced. It took a full three years to tear down the marble and granite masterpiece that Charles McKim had built to last forever. Its Doric columns, sculpted angels and Jules Guerin murals were hastily tossed into a New Jersey swamp and soon thereafter pulverized into dust. Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in the New York Times: ​“Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about twenty-five centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.” Penn Station was only 56 years old.

And so for the past four decades, our visitors and fellow citizens have entered America’s greatest city not through a glorious replica of the Baths of Caracalla, or any kind of sane, functional thoroughfare, but through ​“the chill, bleak anonymity of the twentieth century transit catacombs (ancient catacombs softened even death with frescoes),” decried Huxtable.

A walk down 33rd and 8th is a grim reminder that New Yorkers are still paying a high price for the loss of that civic space and architectural masterpiece. But redemption lies across the street in the Farley Building, a landmark also designed by McKim, Meade and White. Moynihan Station will allow passengers to move through an organized, elegant public space. Moynihan Station will expand capacity in the most heavily used transit hub in the Tri-State rail network and strengthen a critical link between downstate and upstate New York. Moynihan Station will catalyze development of Manhattan’s Far West Side, allowing homes and businesses to rise in neighborhoods that have suffered decades of neglect. And Moynihan Station will restore a grand gateway to the nation in our indispensable city, New York. As Senator Moynihan often said, money used for infrastructure isn’t spending, it’s investing.

Today, we can be more hopeful than at any time for the fulfillment of my father’s vision. The selection of the development team of Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), as announced in July 2005 by Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg and ESDC Chairman Charles Gargano, has put the project over a critical threshold. But after years of delays and false starts, we cannot let optimism slip into complacency. Federal funds that are left too long unspent can be rescinded at any time. We face an out-of-control federal deficit, exacerbated by the costs of the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. We must also be vigilant about what Senator Schumer calls our present ​“culture of inertia”. In spite of broad support for the project among our political leaders, New York has a singular knack for inventing new ways of abandoning great public works.

Senator Moynihan wrote in his book Counting our Blessings: ​“We are a blessed people, but not invincibly elect. We must make our future as we did our past.” Moynihan Station has the support of New York’s Senators, Congressional delegation, Mayor and Governor. It has the support of our fellow citizens. And now it has a talented, vigorous development team. This is a chance for civic redemption that won’t come again. We lost Penn Station once before. Let’s not lose it again.