This:Vintage Depots - Old Penn Station once stood on the site of Madison Square Garden.
My question is, Why? How did planners in the early 60’s convince the city to demolish a beautiful iconic structure and replace it with a basketball arena? Whose soul is currently being roasted?
Back then there were very few historical preservation laws. So while it was protested at the time, the owners of Penn Station were able to demolish the building without any legal restriction.
Ok. But how much protest was there? It makes me sad just looking at photos of the demolition. Were New Yorkers angry at the time? To me, it’s along the same lines of demolishing the Empire State Building in order to build an ugly arena.
On the other hand, what are you going to do about it? The owners of the property certainly have some right to use the property. Is the government going to pay for the property (answer: yes they have to)? Is the government going to pay for the future value of the property? I am willing to bet a large sum that madison square garden is far more profitable than a preserved Penn station – anything preventing a property from being put to its best/highest use is costing someone value.
While the loss of old architecture is sometimes a sad thing, there are large costs both ways. We’re still working this out even today with the wave of post-Kelo domain cases. Where do we draw the line and how do we value the property?
I was in the old Penn Station only once, when demolition of part of it had already begun. All I remember is the amazing area shown in your Photo #3. Yes, there was some outrage, but it wasn’t mainstream, like it would be today. The general thinking back then was that “progress” took precedence over “sentimentality.”
Hell, if it hadn’t been for people like Jackie Onassis, we would have lost Grand Central Station as well.
And **Quintas **mentioned the Empire State Building. Well, prior to the ESB, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel stood on that site. Though it was a magnificent building, I doubt anybody protested its demise.
One of my favorite books is “Lost New York.” It’s a shame how much we’ve lost, just in that one city.
I think of the 50s and 60s as having the ‘out with the old, in with the new’ mentality.
I’m curious if anyone knows what the condition of the building was prior to demolition?
I wonder if all that glass work with such old building technology would have been a nightmare on upkeep?
The demolition of Penn Station was what led to the passing of historic preservation laws in NY City, and probably elsewhere.
The original Penn Station was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad. As owners, they could do what they wanted with it, including selling the building to Madison Square Garden for demolition (The railroad station still remains beneath MSG). Since there were no preservation laws, no one could stop them.
There were some very public protests, and requests to delay the demolition. But, ultimately, the owners could do whatever they wanted and there was no mechanism to stop them.
Things like that have happened. The New York World Building, NYC’s first skyscraper and certainly an architectural landmark, was demolished in 1955 to make room for a traffic ramp.
Yeah, the destruction of Penn Station is widely credited with kick-starting the historic preservation movement in America.
Why it happened? A couple reasons:
People really thought that they would be living in a Jetsons world soon, so getting rid of a old train station was seen as no big deal.
Historically, when we wrecked old buildings and replaced them with new ones, the new buildings were better (like the case of the Empire State Building mentioned above). It wasn’t until Modernists and the like started erecting their flaming piles of garbage that people realized that the old stuff was better.
Nobody used or cared about railroads anymore, that was the heyday of America’s car society. Go look up pictures of Buffalo’s or Detroit’s railroad stations. They are just as beautiful as Penn Station was. Even though railroads have made a comeback, those stations are still just sitting there rotting because nobody uses them.
I think the people of New York City felt a closer connection with Penn Station than they did with other landmarks that were demolished in the era like the New York World Building or the Singer Building. An office building is something you see from the outside but rarely enter unless you work there. Penn Station was a major transportation hub; people were inside it every day. So the thought that Penn Station wouldn’t be there seemed more significant than the loss of a different building would have.
Yeah. Look at this beautiful old Hillsborough County Courthouse in Tampa that was torn down in 1952. A charmless, featureless, boxy police headquarters now stands on the site, with a larger, charmless, featureless, boxy county courthouse down the street. OK, the county’s judicial needs had outgrown the old building, but they could have preserved it as the county’s political center (where the County Commission meets) or something. 
Well, New York did renovate Grand Central Terminal (which probably would have been torn down, too, if laws hadn’t been passed), and it is spectacular (and thus is home to retail shops that pay the rent). Washington’s Union Station got the same treatment.
There were two problems with the replacement for Penn Station in NY: Madison Square Garden was hardly an improvement (I don’t find the building ugly, though – just not beautiful), and what was left of the station was just plain ugly and claustrophobic. Not a good introduction to the city.
This is a wonderful book.
I think it may be out of print, though, judging from the prices on Amazon.
I had a copy years ago, gave it to a friend, then spent years scouring used bookstores till I found another copy.
Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels, by Jill Jonnes is a terrific book on history. Highly recommended.
She covers the history of Penn Station until the end. The truth is that Penn Station had been decaying for decades. Half of it was boarded up or otherwise inaccessible. The interior that everybody oohs about in old pictures was no longer visible - either painted over, covered up, or in disrepair. Usage was way down. The neighborhood was a notorious hellhole. There were no hotels or restaurants anywhere near the station. You couldn’t take public transportation directly to it as easily as you could Grand Central. It wasn’t iconic. It was a slum.
The PRR was in or near bankruptcy and hadn’t been able to do anything that cost money since the boom times of WWII. It would have taken hundreds of millions to restore the station, because it wasn’t just the architecture, it was the entire structure of transportation in and out of NYC. And there was no good reason why two competing railroad stations were needed in a world without railroads.
We can be sorry that the Penn Station of legend isn’t around, but I don’t blame the owners one bit. The world had moved on. Railroads were dead and there was no need to create a living monument to them. Perhaps some other use could have been found, but at the time there were plenty of loudmouth critics none of whom had the slightest notion of a realistic plan to save or reuse the station. It was easy to point fingers when your pockets weren’t affected.
Still is, apparently.
Uhm, what? The 1,2,3 trains had been stopping right there since 1917, the A and D were a block away since 1930, and there were always huge taxi stands. The only public transportation that had stopped going there were the trolleys (another huge loss for the city–to think we had non-polluting, non-gas-guzzling reliable systems that we tossed away!)
My Dad said that the mentality was indeed that tearing down the old buildings was always automatically better. MSG was sold as a huge improvement but never worked, although it’s been improved greatly over the Dickensian hellhole I remember from my 70s childhood.
Actually the city has never been reimbursed for the use of Madison Square Garden. The owners essentially refuse to pay rent and the city allows it because they don’t want to lose the revenue from the tourism it brings.
I’m confused. What money is owed to the city that isn’t being paid? I can’t see it being rent - the property isn’t owned by the city as far as I know. At least it was private property back when Madison Square Garden was built.