Pennsylvania Station
A city tore down a palace to build a basement.
- EXISTED
- 1910, 1963
- WHERE
- New York City, United States
- LOST
- Demolition began 1963
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Demolished for a sports arena and office block
The original Pennsylvania Station was New York’s temple to the age of the railway, a vast Beaux-Arts hall of pink granite modelled on the Baths of Caracalla, its main waiting room soaring to a coffered ceiling, its concourse a cathedral of steel and glass through which daylight fell on the crowds like something holy. For half a century it was simply how one arrived in the greatest city in America.
In 1963, declared unprofitable, it was torn down to build a drab office tower and the arena above the cramped warren that still bears its name. The demolition so shocked the public that it gave birth to the modern preservation movement and New York’s landmarks law, too late for the station itself. Its carved eagles and statues were trucked out to a New Jersey landfill, where some lie to this day.
Its granite eagles and stone goddesses were carted to a swamp in the New Jersey Meadowlands and dumped. “One entered the city like a god,” wrote the historian Vincent Scully; “one scuttles in now like a rat.”