Celebrating a Transit Hub, in All Its Blandness

September 4, 2012, 12:23 pm

By THERESA BURNS

I remember the first time I swept through Penn Station. My oldest sister, Clare, had agreed to take us four “little kids” into the city to see the new movie “Sounder” at Radio City Music Hall. I held fast to her hand as we raced through the crowded station to make the show - it was hot and noisy and confusing, but oddly thrilling when we finally pushed through the mass of dark coats and reached the bracing night air on Seventh Avenue.

Every few years, we revisit the question of what to do about the “problem” of Pennsylvania Station. It has become a staple of New York orthodoxy to condemn the aesthetically challenged hub that houses the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit and Amtrak lin es, and equally predictable, in the next breath, to applaud the exalted space that is Grand Central Terminal.

This year, Michael Kimmelman, a critic for The New York Times, called the building, in the space of a few paragraphs, “a misery,” a “blight,” “an underground purgatory” (for sinners from Long Island and New Jersey, presumably), and a “calamity” that 600,000 commuters must “suffer” every day. “To pass through Grand Central Terminal,” he wrote, “is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station is a humiliation.”

To defend, on the basis of aesthetics, the new Penn Station, and its cousin Madison Square Garden, both built in the 1960s after the now universally condemned destruction of the original McKim, Mead & White building, would surely invite catcalls from every corner, including from my own. One of my children's favorite books was William Low's “Old Penn Station.” Exquisitely illustrated, it chronicled the literal rise and fall of that graceful structure, including the heartbreaking detail that tons of architectural features and statuary salvaged from the wreck were dumped in the swamps of the Meadowlands because no one wanted them.

But is there no one who would miss the new Penn Station if it were gone? After all, buildings are not just about their ennobling features and uplifting vistas. They are vessels of experience, places where memories are born, regardless of the structures' age or opulence or lack thereof. Celtics fans who mourned the loss of the barely functional Boston Garden know this, as do family members saying goodbye to Grandma's modest row house in Bay Ridge.

I am the same age as William Low, born too late to have any memory of the original Penn Station. But I racked up plenty of experiences in its newer, less stately incarnation.

As teenagers growing up on Long Island, my sister and I had our first taste of independence riding the Long Island Rail Road to Penn to take part in St. Patrick's Day celebrations or Macy's Thanksgiving parades. The station also provided us a gateway to Poco and David Bromberg concerts we'd catch in Central Park in the '70s. Lacking any knowledge of Manhattan's countless restaurants, we'd venture across Seventh Avenue to the Penn Bar or the Blarney Stone, architecturally moribund places themselves, where we ate outsize burgers and watched the swarms of sports fans entering and exiting the Garden.

In college a few years later, while traveling back to Boston from New York after holidays, I'd write sentimental poems in the waiting rooms of Amtrak about the harsh city and homeless people and loneliness.

And in my working life as a book editor, when my phone rang at 7:10 p.m., I knew it was an old friend with season tickets calling to ask if I wanted to attend the Knicks game in, yes, 20 minutes. Thanks to Penn Station, I could get from my office to the most famous arena in the world in 10 minutes, with time for a slice and a Sprite before the tipoff.

I still use Penn Station several times a week to go to my teaching job or to a museum or to see friends. There is poetry on the walls of the New Jersey Transit area and a room-sized automated sculpture that my kids love to watch. If I'm a few minutes early, I can grab a slice at my favorite pizza place and read the magazine covers at Hudson News. There are no soaring vistas, no constellations above my head. But it gets me where I need to go, dignity intact.

Do I expect that tears will be shed when this Penn Station, along with the arena above it, is dismantled one day to make way for a structure more “worthy of New York” as Mr. Kimmelman put it? Probably not. Though there might be a kid or two who will turn to his own child while walking through Midtown and say: “See that construction site? That's the place where I saw Jeremy Lin scorch the Lakers in 2012. Too bad they tore it down.”

Theresa Burns is a poet who has taught writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Seton Hall University, among other schools. She is working on “The Quickening,” a book of poems.