The Less Things Change…

From Max Hubacher, May 19, 1961, “Pennsylvania Station, New York”:

Obviously Hubacher was more interested in people than in architecture, and that’s fine. You should look at the photo for his art, the way he intended. After that, you can look at the stuff I’m talking about.

1961 was during the catastrophic loss of ridership for passenger trains in the US, with the number of riders was down and decreasing. My guess is that these people were a mix of long-distance passengers and people waiting for commuter trains to New Jersey. There was no separate concourse for New Jersey commuters in the old building the way that there is now, but there was a separate area for Long Island Railroad, so none of these passengers were heading to Long Island. Probably.

The grand open spaces of Penn Station were not amenable to adding anything much, leading to ugliness like the row of vending machines in the left background. (Grand Central fared somewhat better because of the presence of more interior walls.) Off to the left, out of frame, was a huge and hideous ticket-seller structure added in the 1950s.

The roof above is the famous “What if the ancient Romans had steel and modern glass?” skylight, as seen here during construction in 1905:

So the presence of daylight this far inside is no accident. The floor consists of square glass blocks set in concrete, in a form we usually see in mid-1900s sidewalk vaults, to get light into the concourse on the floor below.

Finally, the pigeons. I’d guess very few came in through the doors. Pigeons tend to avoid human doors, which is probably a good idea. But there were plenty of ways for them to get into the station through the open-air tunnel portals west of the station (now the site of the Hudson Yards development) and some open-air track areas within the station building itself.

Plans to demolish the station headhouse had been floated in the 1950s, but nothing came of it. The plan that succeeded was made public about a year after this photo. I wonder what those passengers, who look very much like passengers waiting today, would have said if you told them that demolition would begin in less than two years.