Moynihan penn station11/20/2023 The remaining 637,000 square feet have been leased as office space to Facebook, plus some 70,000 square feet of developed outdoor roof space for the social media giant. Per the lease, 475,000 of the total 1,112,000 square feet-less than half-are for the train hall, LIRR and Amtrak facilities, and "transportation-oriented retail space." That's much smaller than the old Penn Station, which was on a similarly sized plot. The United States Postal Service sold the building to the state, which then leased it for 99 years to private developers. The train hall may be the headliner, but it is just a part of the Farley Post Office rehabilitation. It is across the street, in part of the old James Farley Post Office Building, which was constructed just a few years after the original Penn Station, designed by the same architects, and intentionally mimicked the Penn Station Beaux Arts style (it received landmark status in 1966, thanks to the preservation movement Penn's destruction ushered in, so the original facade has not been altered).īut the main reason Moynihan cannot and will never match the original Penn Station is because it is an ornamental decoration to an otherwise private office building. The new train hall-it is not accurate to call it a new station, as the tracks and platforms are the same-also occupies a different physical space than the old Penn Station. Like the original Penn Station, which was for Pennsylvania Railroad customers first and foremost, Moynihan is largely for Amtrak riders. Many Long Island Railroad riders will, too. All New Jersey Transit riders will still descend under the Garden. For starters, the old Penn Station is still there underneath Madison Square Garden, just as it has been for the last half-century, and will continue to be used by hundreds of thousands of people every day whenever we return to some semblance of normalcy. Moynihan could never be a true Penn Station successor, much less change the tune for New York City. That's a lot of pressure to put on a building. If buildings can be narrative-shifters, this is quite the timing. The main goal was no longer to build back better, but to cling to what we have.Īnd so it is in a sense fitting that the Moynihan Train Hall, the city's first real attempt to replace a portion of what was lost some 55 years ago, opened on January 1, 2021, the day after one of the most dire, harrowing years New York has ever faced. Instead, they felt a growing sense that what came next would be worse. People began to assume that anything good that was lost would no longer be replaced with something better. The destruction of the old Penn Station "flipped the optimistic narrative" of the city, Kimmelman argued. In 2019, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman likened the historic preservation movement-born from the Penn Station rubble-to collective pessimism. It is a story that doesn't end as much as it sloppily devolves. In this sense, the photos of Penn Station are a handy starting point to understanding the city's 20th Century story. The early 1900s is when modern New York became itself, the early-to-mid 1900s were arguably its peak, and the post 1960s saw its rapid decline. As it happens, these periods roughly coincide with three definitive eras of New York City lore.
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