New train station fulfills a daughter’s vow
MNew York aura Moynihan promised her father, U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, before his death in 2003, that she would avenge what he considered one of the worst crimes committed against New Yorkers and millions of visitors who arrive in Manhattan by train.
She vowed to continue her father’s decadeslong fight to create a new Pennsylvania Station by transforming an old post office across the street to reclaim lost grandeur for rail travelers and serve as a worthy entryway to one of the world’s most celebrated cities.
“My father always said the old Penn Station was the best thing in our city and it was the single greatest act of vandalism in the history of New York when some bastard knocked it down,” recalled his 63-year-old daughter. She was born in Alba
ny when her father worked as an aide for Gov. Averell Harriman and married a fellow Harriman staffer, Elizabeth “Liz” Brennan.
The senator’s daughter was invited by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to attend a ribboncutting Dec. 30 at the Moynihan Train Hall, named for her father. Her 91-year-old mother, who lives on the Upper East Side, was unable to attend due to frail health. The 255,000square-foot station transformed the long-vacant James A. Farley Post Office Building ’s mail sorting room with 92-foothigh ceilings, massive steel trusses and a sprawling glass skylight atrium that covers an acre and bathes the train station with natural light.
The rail hub opened Dec. 31 for commuters and passengers via Amtrak, the LIRR and the MTA. Penn Station is the busiest passenger transportation facility in the Western Hemisphere, typically used by more than 700,000 passengers per day — more than JFK, LaGuardia and Newark airports combined.
Cuomo praised the vision and persistence of the late Democratic senator from New York and noted that a publicprivate partnership brought the $1.6 billion project to completion on time and on budget, despite the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We built this as a statement of who we are, and who we aspire to be,” Cuomo said.
It felt like redemption to Moynihan. “I couldn’t believe it was actually done after my dad pushed for it for more than 20 years,” she said. “The two heroes in the long saga are Andrew Cuomo and Chuck Schumer.”
The demolished beaux-arts landmark station in Midtown Manhattan lamented by the senator was a masterpiece of pink granite, marble columns, arched-glass windows and soaring public space that filled an 8-acre site between 31st and 33rd streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues.
Penn Station was in Moynihan’s backyard when he lived in
the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in his late teens. He was the oldest of three children raised by a single mother who worked as a nurse. Their father abandoned the family in 1937, when Moynihan was 10.
“They bounced around a lot from apartment to apartment, struggling to pay rent,” his daughter said of her father’s early years. Her father shined shoes at Penn Station. Inside that majestic temple to rail travel, he felt better about their difficult circumstances.
“Growing up, my father and his brother Michael talked endlessly about Penn Station,” recalled his daughter, an artist and author.
The original Penn Station, built in 1910, was torn down in 1963 to make way for the massive Madison Square Garden sports arena above street level. The below-ground levels near the tracks became the de facto station, a subterranean hellscape marred by grime and vagrants. Architectural historian Vincent Scully bemoaned: “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”
“Historic buildings were not valued in the early 1960s. It was a period when our culture believed new was almost always better,” architectural critic Paul Goldberger said by phone from his home in New York City. “A lot of cities were tearing down their old buildings, including Albany to make way for the Empire State Plaza.”
Rail travel dropped sharply
in that era with the ascendancy of automobiles and commercial airlines, putting railroads in the red, noted Goldberger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and author formerly at The New York Times and the New Yorker and now at Vanity Fair. Goldberger served as a consultant to the Moynihan Train Hall project. In his remarks at the ribbon cutting, he praised Cuomo and Moynihan for “understanding what architecture can do for the spirit and soul of a place.”
Goldberger told me that he spoke often with Moynihan over the years about the onagain, off-again train station project. He called the senator “a great architecture buff who probably knew more and cared more about public architecture than any political figure since Thomas Jefferson.” Moynihan envisioned the idea of transforming the post office across the street into a new rail station since it, too, was designed by the old Penn Station’s esteemed architectural firm Mckim, Mead & White. Furthermore, train tracks already ran under the post office when mail moved by rail. The building was unused for decades after postal operations moved to a new location designed for trucking.
“Senator Moynihan was very frustrated because he was having a hard time moving his great idea forward,” Goldberger said. “Part of the problem had to do with the obvious issues of money, but also the political
challenges of getting the city, the state, the federal government, Amtrak and all the railroads to agree and sign off on the project.”
Interest waxed and waned and had a brief resurgence after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Moynihan positioned a new Penn Station as a catalyst for the stricken city ’s comeback. When the senator died, it seemed like the project might have died along with him, but his daughter persisted. “Maura Moynihan deserves a lot of credit for continuing to push hard for it and keeping the project alive,” Goldberger said.
Considerable work on additional tracks and amenities, including bars, restaurants, boutiques and office space leased by Facebook, remains to be finished at the Moynihan Train Hall. Already, though, it qualifies as “a majestic public space that offers uplift to people arriving and departing New York that ennobles and dignifies travelers.”
Maura Moynihan imagined her father at the grand opening of the train hall that bears his name. “He would have been so proud and he would have toasted it with some Irish whiskey,” she said.
Paul Grondahl is director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany and a former Times Union reporter. He can be reached at grondahlpual@gmail.com