Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Surely some of the conventioneers now gathering at Madison Square Garden are architecture buffs. As such, they are aware that their convention takes place on the site of New York’s greatest building ever to be demolished.
The Pennsylvania Railroad had long operated its trains to a terminal in Jersey City. Readers of Edith Wharton will recall from “The Age of Innocence” the scene where Newland Archer goes to Jersey City to fetch Ellen. He meets her train, then accompanies her by ferry to Manhattan. That Penn terminal is gone; Exchange Place occupies the site at Paulus Hook. Farther south in Jersey City, how ever, and clearly visible from Battery Park City, still stands the old terminal of the Jersey Central, minus its ferry dock. To the north, Hoboken’s wonderful Lackawanna Terminal retains its ferry. The ferries were needed because steam trains couldn’t safely operate through tunnels under the river. Thus the West Side Penn Station awaited electric trains. In 1910, that station finally opened.
The Penn was not the first railroad to tunnel under the river. Credit for that goes to the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, which established a station in lower Manhattan. The H & M’s later bankruptcy necessitated its takeover by the Port Authority, which renamed the railroad the Port Authority Trans Hudson. In acquiring the H & M’s lower Manhattan lands, they also erected a new PATH station topped by something called the World Trade Center.
Just so, the Pennsylvania, reeling from the postwar decline of passenger rail, chose, in the 1960s, to demolish its magnificent McKim, Mead & White structure in favor of a new Penn Station topped by an office and arena complex. The architectural historian Vincent Scully famously said that while one once entered New York like a king, one now scurries in like a rat. Penn Station, to put it mildly, is not a beloved building.
Still, remnants of the old place can be seen by the careful visitor. Some stairs between the concourse and the platforms, for example, retain railings from the old station. This tells us that the track and platform layout was left largely intact, and with it the station’s overall arrangement of spaces. Aided by old photos such as those almost tauntingly slapped on some of the concourse walls, we thus may divine what was where in the glory days of McKim’s station.
A more substantial reminder of the old days is the austere granite building on the south side of 31st Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. This building was the generating plant that powered the electric engines rumbling through the tunnels. Built in 1908, this was McKim, Mead & White’s handiwork. Being across the street, the plant eluded destruction when Madison Square Garden went up.
Perhaps one day we’ll witness the long-promised removal of Amtrak’s facilities to a new space carved out of the General Post Office across Eighth Avenue. For now, one hopes that architecture buffs among the delegates will find time to visit Grand Central Terminal.