bigkid posted:The original Penn Station was demolished because the Pennsylvania RR was run into the ground by its managers, they were looking to get out of the maintenance of the building but more importantly, were looking for the money that came from selling the air rights above the stadium site , as well as money from the developers of Madison square Garden (and from what I have heard from old timers , a lot of that money went into the pockets of the PRR executives and also into some pretty shady kickback schemes). There also were other politics, there was no reason to build a new Garden, the old one on 48th and 8th was still in good shape, but NYC was in a building slump and the construction unions were pushing Albany and the city to push new projects and provide jobs. If Penn Station had been a public structure they might have been happy with the jobs created by renovating the old station, but because it was owned by the PRR that was not going to happen. This is a classic example imo why the business decisions of private companies are not necessarily the best for the public or often themselves (the 'rebuilt' Penn Station certainly didn't do much to enhance train travel), for the PRR the fact that they were leaving behind a subterranean hell for the people using the station mattered not one bit, "The Public Be Dammed" hadn't died with Vanderbilt, that is for sure.
Others have hit the nail on the head when they mentioned the 'modernist' wave, where there was this massive push by architects and their business clients to put up giant glass boxes (that ironically had their roots in proletarian worker housing conceived of by Mies Van der rooh (spelling?) and the whole Bauhaus movement (Tom Wolfe brilliantly tore the whole concept apart in "from bauhaus to our house"), everything was glass and steel boxes, not preserving the past which to these idiots was to be sneered at or lost (very similar to the types who in classical music promote 'new music' that listening wise is the equivalent of having to go through the current Penn Station).
I love these drawings and I agree, with modern materials and construction, it could be something that could last a long time and not be a maintenance nightmare. I doubt very much anything like this will happen soon, though, not with the current climate in Washington run by people who think train travel and mass transit is a boondoggle and whose support of infrastructure I suspect is more hot air than reality, and not with pressing infrastructure like the gateway project tunnels and the rehab of the LIRR tunnels under the East River.
Thank you, thank you. Great minds think alike.
