Magnificent and necessary
This morning, five hours into the new year, while it’s still dark outside, the doors will open on New York’s newest masterpiece, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall. But the brightest part of this spectacular $1.6 billion depot for LIRR and Amtrak passengers won’t have arrived yet.
It will roll in from the east at 7:20, sunrise, as the rays pour into vast space through the vaulted skylight. This is what public works can look like and feel like; did you forget? This is what government can accomplish when it sets out to build big things.
Spanning an acre of glass 92 feet up, the translucent roof restores to Penn Station what the wrecker’s ball felled in 1963: natural light. The original 1910 Penn was bathed in it under soaring ceilings. The shocking demolition of that glorious edifice strengthened the landmarks preservation movement, which saved Grand Central Terminal and its sunlit concourse.
As Moynihan, the learned senator who pushed for this for years before his passing in 2003 said, we had a shot at redemption — the chance to save Penn’s surviving twin right across Eighth Ave., a building by the same architects, in the same Beaux-Arts style, with the same footprint and the same tracks and platforms beneath: the 1913 monumental General Post Office, with its wide steps and chiseled frieze proclaiming, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Year after year, bureaucracy and inertia and myopia and small thinking stayed the completion of Moynihan’s wise vision.
Full credit to Gov. Cuomo, who finally got it done on budget and ahead of schedule, another timely reminder that beautiful and useful public works can uplift and serve the masses. We also salute Michael Evans, who started working on the project a decade ago and led the effort for six years before his untimely death i n March at the young age of 40. It is fitting that the great space is named for Moynihan, as we urged when he announced his retirement in 1998. We didn’t know it would take 22 years. It is also right that the whole structure is the James A. Farley Building, after Big Jim, FDR’s campaign manager who was postmaster general when the western half of the place was erected.
Big Jim died the very day that Pat began his first Senate run, June 9, 1976. And it was a freshman congressman on the Post Office committee who put Farley’s name on the building in 1982. That was Chuck Schumer, who has championed the Train Hall plan for years.
Over time, including when our offices were right around the corner, we’ve been to too many tangled ribbon cuttings for Moynihan/Farley/Penn — so many that it started seeming like one of those dreams that repeats, never quite fitting together. This week’s was the last. This week, we woke up.
Most welcome is a direct connection from the grand postal lobby and by next year, an arcade all the way out to Ninth Ave., mirroring 1910 Penn. It’s also excellent that policing and cleaning, now balkanized at Penn, will be unified.
What’s stupid are signs on the doors saying that NJTransit is only available across Eighth Ave. That’s actually not true for the soon-to-be majority carrier at Penn. However, NJT’s Tracks 1 to 4 don’t yet extend to Moynihan, and NJT is spending $340 million on unnecessary work at Penn that could instead be used to bring their passengers into the light.
The first Gov. Cuomo wisely lengthened all the LIRR platforms west in 1986. NJT’s four tracks must be extended next, increasing efficiency and relieving crowding.
As this Gov. Cuomo hands Amtrak the keys to the new palace, he should insist that they give him the keys to Penn. Then New York can finally fix up all of that dungeon. It may never inspire like Moynihan Train Hall does, but at least it can serve the people with dignity.