What can we learn from Penn Station?

This blog is about airline terminals, but today's topic is a railroad station. It doesn't exist anymore, but I just visited it. Confused? Read on, and let's see what we can learn.

It's the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City—the monumental Beaux Arts masterpiece of architect Charles McKim that was unceremoniously demolished in the mid-1960s to make way for the then-new Madison Square Garden.

While the station's above-ground buildings were torn down, all the railroad tracks and platforms remain in place deep underground, pretty much as they were when the original station opened in 1910. Trains still rumble in and out—enough so that the place remains the busiest passenger rail station in the country.

What's above the platforms, however, ain't what it used to be.

In McKim's original station, passengers alighted from trains onto platforms flooded with natural light that streamed in from a vaulted glass ceiling more than 100 feet above. Ornate brass and iron staircases carried arriving passengers to the upper level of the magnificent glass and iron concourse, designed as an homage to the great European trainsheds. It provided a grand welcome to one of the world's great cities.

Today, passengers step off trains onto those same platforms, only to cower underneath a grimy concrete ceiling that looms a few feet above. Claustrophobia-inducing pipes and ducts hang from it. Lighting is harsh—you can't tell whether it's day or night. The air is still. It's noisy, but you can't tell where the noise is coming from.

It's also not clear where you go next. Eventually you're herded up cramped escalators to a confusing warren of yet more low-ceiled passages, with no windows and no light until you finally emerge onto the street much later, assuming you ever do. It's like arriving in New York through the service entrance.

In one area, it's a masterpiece—efficiency, because it inspires an overwhelming desire to get the heck out of there as fast as possible.

The difference between the original terminal and what replaced it—does it matter? Yes. The original was a great public space, a constant inspiration to travellers, a gateway that enobled all who passed through it, and helped make New York City a kick-ass place, whether you were coming or going.

The replacement is fit for hamsters, but not humans, and certainly not for a place known for its superlatives. In short, it's a bust.

It's so dreadful that Amtrak (successor to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which built the original station and then allowed it to be torn down) has been considering a hugely expensive plan to transform the equally monumental former post office building (next door, also designed by Charles McKim at the same time) into a newly reborn Penn Station. It'll cost billions, if it ever gets done, and my guess is it won't.

I never got to experience the original Penn Station. Never used it to board a train, never walked through it, never got to hear the constant manmade murmur that I'm told bounced off its marble walls. So it's easy for me to romanticize it as the “greatest of all train terminals.”

And true, I sometimes think that if there is an afterlife and it's a nice place and if I'm somehow qualified to be there, I imagine it would look something like the concourse of the original Penn Station.

As beautiful as the station was, it had problems. Some say it was too overwhelming. Some cursed the vast scale that had to be covered to reach the train platforms, and the lack of anyplace at all to sit in the vast main hall. The main dining hall and the separate waiting rooms for men and women weren't thought out well. And, most importantly, the facility was hugely expensive to maintain and even to keep clean, which made it easier for the Pennsy to say buh-bye when the railroad fell on hard times.

So this raises the question: What happens when a private company builds a grand public space such as a train terminal, but then can't maintain it? One answer is what happened to Penn Station. But another is what happened to New York City's other big train station, Grand Central Terminal. That nearly got demolished, too, but eventually the run-down property came under government management (specifically, the MTA), which mounted a massive restoration effort supported by public money.

Today, Grand Central is celebrated as a city icon, still in use as a very busy railroad station but also a magnet for tourists. Penn Station is a magnet for lunatics, who feel right at home in its Rubik's cube-like tunnels.

Ironically, Grand Central only serves commuter lines; all long-distance trains now use Penn. Gone are the days when Cary Grant, as in the Hitchcock thriller 'North by Northwest ,' could duck into Grand Central and slip aboard the 20th Century Limited to get out of town.

So what does this all have to do with airport terminals?

Well, in terms of design, the original Pennsylvania made a sound case for terminal as modern-day cathedral, a fitting setting for departures and arrivals that marked important moments in countless lives. It enriched everyone who encountered it, and that's something that airline terminals (the train stations of our day) ought to aspire to. Penn Station showed the way.

However, the original Penn Station was built by an incredibly rich private corporation, the Pennsylvania Railroad, at the height of its power, in the early 20th century. Its main visionary, railroad president Alexander Cassett, was in a position to spare no expense in creating a station that would serve as a physical symbol of the railroad's influence and success.

Well, that position was only a very short window. Railroads were soon in decline in the U.S., the Pennsy included. So the huge effort required to build such a grand edifice was similar to, say, the Apollo effort to put a man on the moon: the result of a special confluence of circumstances that enabled it to happen, and which may not happen again for a long time, if ever.

Can we build the equivalent of Penn Station today? Well, the airline business is subject to more fast-moving turmoil than any railroad ever was. Airlines come and go, hubs are built and taken apart, great carriers merge and disappear from their hometowns.

So it's easy to understand why airlines themselves often aren't willing to put a lot of effort into facilities. Look at the abandoned concourses in St. Louis (former TWA hub), Cincinnati (former Delta hub), and especially Pittsburgh, where a new midfield concourse was built for USAirways, large portions of which are now walled-off and abandoned since the carrier de-hubbed.

Yes, it's a different model today. Airlines, which are for-profit businesses, do put money into terminals where they know they're going to be around for awhile. It's money well spent. But otherwise, it's up to government (meaning the public) to rise to the challenge of building and maintaining a terminal that enobles the traveller. And in an age of austerity budgets, there's a temptation to take the cheapest, most expeditious route—to go the way of the “new” Penn Station, which everyone agrees is a monstrosity. Is that the best we can do?

But I think the basic lesson still stands (unlike the original Penn Station): that our public spaces say a lot about who we are, and it's worth the effort to make them distinctive and memorable. In other words, old Penn Station, not new Penn Station, to whatever extent possible.

Postscript: Though the original Penn Station has been gone for nearly 50 years, a few traces still survive in the current subway-station-like facility, if you know where to look. Coming across them, still doing their jobs amid all the blandness, is like finding an old wheat cent in change. It's a survivor from another era, not that long gone but absolutely gone for good.

The most obvious leftovers are two original brass and iron staircases that still take travelers up from the platforms. While most platforms are jammed with chunky escalators and elevators, for some reason these graceful survivors soldier on.

One is on the east end of the platform for Tracks 13 and 14; it's short, going up just one level to the “arrivals” concourse, and is now partially covered in battleship gray. But it's there, complete with the gateway grille at the base of the steps and the original iron support pillar under the first landing. I used it to exit from my train.

The other is on the platform between Tracks 5 and 6. It's a complete multi-landing original staircase bringing travelers from the main ticketing level (the floor of the former concourse) all the way down to the platform. It's now hemmed in by tiled walls, and the ornate ironwork at the bottom is damaged and partially missing, but it's ready to carry passengers just as in photos taken prior to the station's 1910 grand opening.

Access to to most platforms at Penn Station are controlled by gate agents and tickets are required, so I was surprised to find the old staircase (behind glass doors) open. So down I went, taking pictures, marveling at the original brass handrails and also the irony of the photos of the old Penn Station decorating the stairwell.

The original Pennsylvania Station was built for the ages. Instead, it lasted barely 50 years. Its loss was one of the world's great acts of architectural vandalism, and led to new rules protecting similar landmarks in New York City and elsewhere. In terms of terminals, it showed us what's possible. Would that we had the wisdom, the resources, and the long-term outlook to learn and profit from its example.

Amtrak notes: My recent trip was a good reminder about the importance of public announcements in any form of transit. Our train, Northeast Regional 174, was scheduled to depart Penn Station at 2 p.m., but was a few minutes late. No problem. But along the way, we made repeated stops between station, and the delay began to grow.

By the time we left New Haven, we were at least a half-hour behind, maybe more. I don't know for sure because throughout all of this, not a single annoucement was made to anyone about it. And the stops continued. Anytime a conductor came through, people asked what time we were due in such-and-such a stop, and the answers seemed to vary wildly.

Amtrak's online train status feature had us as 28 minutes behind as we pulled into Providence, so at least that was something. But the train crew made no announcements whatsoever, leaving people grumbling and shaking their heads and generally unhappy. Some kind of announcement about the nature of the delay would have gone a looooong way toward keeping people happy, but we got bupkiss.

I do think it depends on the crews, which seem to vary widely. Sometimes you get thorough and coherent explanations; other times they make an effort, but a malfunctioning P.A. system renders it unintelligible. And other times, like today, you get nothing at all, which is unacceptable.

On Northeast Regional 174 on Friday, May 20, the crew seemed to be by turns belligerent, combative, uninformed, or entirely absent. And it really makes a difference. Across from me was a woman going to Bridgeport, Conn. who was burdened with a huge piece of luggage and who had never travelled by train ever before. I helped her with the bag (no problem there), but the real fun happened when Bridgeport was the next stop.

At one point, the train began to slow and enter a station, but we had no announcement, so the woman assumed it had to be Bridgeport. She hastily got up, hauled her bag out on her own, and then went into the vestibule at the end of the car to detrain.

The problem was, we weren't at Bridgeport, but at another station, South Norwalk, where we were halting for apparently yet another delay, and on an inside “express track,” with a commuter train on one side of us blocking the view. Our train finally did stop, and we were at a station, and this poor woman began panicking in the vestibule because she wasn't sure how to get off.

Other people were standing in the aisle and I finally asked a woman to tell her that her stop wasn't until a bit later. What confusion, where a few clear announcements could have made all the difference. Talk note, Amtrak. Might want to brush up on the customer service skills.

And that takes us to Amtrak's so-called “quiet” cars. These are designed for passengers who want a refuge from loud conversations or serial cell-phone yakkers. It's a nice idea, and it's amazing that they even try to do this in a country such as America, and especially in the Northeast, where people can be amazingly clueless about public behavior.

But they do, and the crew members really do make an effort—sometimes. On some trains, I've sat in the quiet car, and crews go to the trouble to make special “sotto voci” announcements just for the occupants, explaining that it's a library-like atmosphere and they're serious about no cell phone use—if you must yak, please sit in another car. (On Northeast Regional 174, there were no announcements whatsoever, either about the quiet car or where the cafe car was or about upcoming stops, which seems downright irresponsible. Not sure what the story is with that.)

Still, I like sitting in the Quiet Car, not because I necessarily crave quiet, but because there's always drama when some clueless schlub sits down and immediately start chatting loudly on his or her cell phone. (In practice, though, it's usually a guy.) Sometimes a crew member will be right there, telling the person to leave the car, and sometimes the reactions are priceless.

Other times, passengers themselves enforce the code of silence. On today's Northeast Regional 174, two old acquaintances passing the Quiet Car through discovered each other, and a loud mini-reunion ensued right here in the aisle, almost directly below a 'Quiet Car' sign. No crew members were present, and even if they were I doubt they'd have said anything, since there was no mention of the quiet car at any time during the run; in fact, crew members would march through, loudly talking among themselves or fielding questions about the delays. With the mini-reunion, it finally fell to yours truly to politely inform the ladies that they were in what was supposed to be the Quiet Car. They had no idea, of course, and the immediately decamped after thanking me.

I think I should get an honorary crew badge from Amtrak, but I don't hold out much hope.