New York Politicians Hype New Train Station Without One Thing: The Trains

Before the pandemic, some 600,000 people grudgingly trudged through Penn Station every day. Approximately zero of them would have done so if not for one reason: The trains. 

This may seem like an obvious point. Penn Station is a train station. People from Long Island, New Jersey, and other points in the country via Amtrak come to and from Penn Station to catch a train. Everything else in the station, from the formerly-gross-but-now-decent bathrooms to the sad waiting halls to the underrated pizza place is to serve the people who are there for the trains. 

Apparently, this is not obvious to the officials who gathered at Moynihan Train Hall on Thursday to hype the “New Penn Station” project, which would replace the current Penn Station with a fancier, more expensive, and brighter space, along with several new skyscrapers. Among all the renderings, plans, and videos made to get New Yorkers excited about this real estate project, one thing was conspicuously missing: the trains. Not one vision of what the future Penn Station might look like includes even the slightest glimpse of a train, train tracks, or any other indication this place is fundamentally about the trains. There are more cars in the renderings for the New Penn Station than there are trains.

This may seem like a minor point, a nitpick among a visionary attempt to give New York a second world-class transportation hub alongside Grand Central. But it is further evidence the powers that be will bungle this Penn Station redevelopment just as badly as it did the last one. I’m not talking about the 1960s demolition of the original Penn Station which was an iconic and glorious facility whose demolition to make way for a sports arena and office tower is widely regarded as one of the most barbarous architectural murders in American history. I’m referring to the one the press conference was held in, the still sparkling Moynihan Train Hall. 

As I wrote when it opened in 2021, Moynihan Train Hall is not a train station as much as a trojan horse for a real estate giveaway to Vornado, a real estate company which used the formerly-publicly-owned space of the Farley Post Office to construct a new office for Facebook. The train hall is a small chunk of that space, touted as the main benefit of the redevelopment project when it is in fact a small sideshow. It is also not a good train station. It is a full avenue block away from the actual trains, which requires descending narrow escalators one at a time to access the tracks, which passengers then have to walk along long, narrow platforms to reach, or otherwise take a circuitous route along a maze of ramps and corridors. In practice, long lines form around the hall just to get down to the tracks where there is little space to maneuver. It has precious little seating space, an overpriced food hall, and very nice bathrooms. It cost $1.6 billion and virtually everyone I know who has used it as a train station came away puzzled by its apparent disutility as an actual train station.

Will the New Penn Station, if built, repeat that mistake? It sure looks like it. There is virtually nothing in the renderings that distinguishes the New Penn Station from any other real estate development project. It looks like a fancy office park or mall, a Hudson Yards or Oculus 2.0, because, like Moynihan, that is its true purpose. The Penn Station redevelopment is being pitched to convince the public—which will pay for a good if indeterminate chunk of the whole deal through complicated tax financing schemes—that it’s all worth doing. But, in only one rendering could I see any idea of how people will get to and from the train tracks, the slightest of hints this is the busiest train station in the Western hemisphere. It is right here:

Of course, these are merely renderings and the project is in the initial phases. But from what we can see, the visioneers of “New Penn Station” imagine not a new Penn Station but an expanded Moynihan Train Hall, one that prioritizes real estate developer needs over those of riders. To me, the renderings say everything we need to know about how disappointingly far the New Penn Station will fall from the original one.

There are many, many photos of Original Penn Station’s tracks. Looking at these photos, I do not have to wonder how people got to and from the tracks. The entire focus of the station was the tracks. Everything flowed to and from them.

The people who built Old Penn Station were not confused about what train stations are for. They’re for the trains.