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CityAndStateNY.com
June 28, 2021 - July 5, 2021
Cuomo’s Penn By Zach Williams
The original Penn Station, above, opened in 1910 and was mostly demolished in the 1960s. It’s now an underground station, top right. The new Moynihan Train Hall, bottom right, is the first project in Cuomo’s vision to build a new, expanded Penn Station hub.
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EW YORK CITY has changed a lot over the past century, but its commuter rail network remains fundamentally the same. Almost every line still leads to midtown Manhattan, like spokes on two wheels that rotate around Penn Station on the west side and Grand Central Terminal to the east. They are the transit hubs inherited from a bygone era of railroading, when private operators laid tracks and built stations that still bear their names. The rail lines that bring hundreds of thousands of people to Penn Station each day via New Jersey Transit and Amtrak are the same ones the Pennsylvania Railroad installed to bring people to the imposing train station modeled on the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla in 1910. The station also serves as the main New York City terminal for the Long Island Rail Road. By tunneling under the Hudson River, passengers from points west no longer needed to take a ferry from New Jersey. The only long-distance trains entering Manhattan at that time came via the Bronx on tracks controlled by the New York Central Railroad. That route is now part of the Metro-North system. The rail network has reflected and enabled the outsized economic importance of Manhattan ever since. Nine out of 10 commuter trips to the city end up in the borough, according to a September 2019 study by the New York City Department of Planning. This has placed unforeseen pressure on the underground transit hub that replaced the original above-ground Penn Station demolished in 1963, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates Penn Station in cooperation with Amtrak and NJ Transit. The current station that opened in 1968 handled 200,000 daily commuters in its early years. As reported by the MTA, ridership grew to about 600,000 people per day by 2020. This overcrowding contributes to the station’s well-earned reputation as a depressing, disorienting warren to pass through. Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to change that. He is championing a plan that he first unveiled before the pandemic that aims to expand the station while restoring it to grandeur. Future riders from New Jersey would cross the Hudson through two new tunnels being built as part of the wider Gateway Program. Future passengers for NJ Transit would arrive on new underground tracks on the block south of the current station, which would still have Madison Square Garden above it. More Amtrak passengers than ever before would exit via the newly opened Moynihan Train Hall built out of a century-old former postal facility. Similar to the beaux-arts Penn Station it once faced, Moynihan was built to inspire awe with features like a vaulted ceiling, Tennessee marble floors and 20-piece outdoor Corinthian colonnade. “When you go there, it fills your soul with pride,” Cuomo recently boasted. Ten
S CERVIN ROBINSON/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; WOODYS PHOTOS, VALERIY EYDLIN/SHUTTERSTOCK
Would the governor’s new transit hub just reinvent the wheel?
