page_title: Pennsylvania Station (1910–1963)
section_title: Present day
hierarchical_section_title: Pennsylvania Station (1910–1963) / History / Present day
caption_attribution_description: Penn Station (New York City)
context_page_description: Pennsylvania Station was a historic railroad station in New York City, named for the Pennsylvania Railroad, its builder and original tenant. The station occupied an 8-acre plot bounded by Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 31st and 33rd Streets in Midtown Manhattan. As the terminal shared its name with several stations in other cities, it was sometimes called New York Pennsylvania Station, or Penn Station for short.
  The building was designed by McKim, Mead, and White and completed in 1910, enabling direct rail access to New York City from the south for the first time. Its head house and train shed were considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the great architectural works of New York City. The station contained 11 platforms serving 21 tracks, in approximately the same layout as the current Penn Station. The original building was one of the first stations to include separate waiting rooms for arriving and departing passengers, and when built, these were among the city's largest public spaces.
  Passenger traffic began to decline after World War II, and in the 1950s, the Pennsylvania Railroad sold the air rights to the property and shrank the railroad station.
context_section_description: The current Penn Station is situated completely underground and is located underneath Madison Square Garden at 33rd Street and Two Penn Plaza. The station spans three levels, with the concourses located on the upper two levels and the train platforms located on the lowest level. The two levels of concourses, while original to the 1910 station, were renovated extensively during the construction of Madison Square Garden, and expanded in subsequent decades.  The tracks and platforms are also largely original, except for newer track connections to the West Side Rail Yard and the Amtrak Empire Corridor serving Albany and Buffalo. There are three areas of the station, arranged into separate concourses for Amtrak, NJ Transit (which operates the former PRR commuter lines from New Jersey), and the LIRR. 
  Comparing the new and the old Penn Station, Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully once wrote, "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat." Despite having undergone improvements since the 1960s, Penn Station is criticized as a low-ceilinged "catacomb" lacking charm, especially when compared to the larger and more ornate Grand Central Terminal. The New York Times, in a November 2007 editorial supporting development of an enlarged railroad terminal, said that "Amtrak's beleaguered customers ... now scurry through underground rooms bereft of light or character." Times transit reporter Michael M. Grynbaum wrote that Penn Station was "the ugly stepchild of the city's two great rail terminals." Along similar lines, Michael Kimmelman wrote in 2019 that while downsizing Penn Station and moving it underground may have made a modicum of sense at the time, in hindsight it was a sign that New York was "disdainful of its gloried architectural past." He also claimed that the remodeled station is not commensurate with its status as the main rail gateway to New York.
  In the early 1990s, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan began to champion a plan to rebuild a replica of the historic Penn Station; he had shined shoes in the original station during the Great Depression. He proposed building it in the nearby Farley Post Office building. In 1999 Senator Charles Schumer sponsored and passed legislation formally naming the yet-to-be-constructed facility "Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station" in his honor. The project, since renamed "Moynihan Train Hall", was split off into two phases. The first phase, the West End Concourse, opened in the eastern part of the former post office in June 2017. The second phase which consists of expanding Penn Station's facilities into parts of the post office itself is expected to open in 2022.
caption: Amtrak concourse of the modern station
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