page_title: Lester C. Tichy
section_title: Penn Station and Tichy's “Clamshell”
hierarchical_section_title: Lester C. Tichy / Penn Station and Tichy's “Clamshell”
caption_attribution_description: English: The main waiting room at Penn Station, New York City.
context_page_description: Lester C. Tichy was a prolific 20th-century American architect and industrial designer. Tichy is perhaps best known for his association with the Pennsylvania Railroad, for which he created the infamous “Clamshell”, an aluminum and steel canopy over the electronic ticketing area, in Penn Station’s Main Waiting Room in New York City. Tichy's “Clamshell” is largely seen as a harbinger of the station's ultimate demolition, and stands for the lost landmark's final decline.
context_section_description: Though Tichy's imprint appeared on a range of modern structures, he became best identified with his 1956 “Clamshell” in Manhattan’s original Penn Station.
  By 1952, Tichy remained associated with the Pennsylvania Railroad, although he had left its employ. The Pennsylvania, confronting mounting passenger losses, contracted with Tichy to replace Penn Station's grand Savarin dining room with a series of two bowling alleys in an attempt to raise cash off its cavernous – but cash-bleeding – Manhattan facility. Throughout 1952, Tichy partnered with the Pennsylvania to develop revenue-generating concessions at Penn Station and air-rights sales over its adjacent rail yards.
  Tichy's new partnership with the Pennsylvania was a harbinger of things to come. In 1954, Tichy himself “prepared plans for an orderly demolition” of the beloved station, and began associating with real estate titans William Zeckendorf and Benjamin Swig.
  With the scent of redevelopment in the air, Tichy then began designing an airline-style ticket counter to satiate the Pennsylvania's desire to boost ticket sales and make money off its station. “Whether desperately or cynically,” wrote The New York Times, railroad executives “seemed to understand that redevelopment of their money-losing, nine-acre station would be more palatable if the public could be made to forget the glories of Mr. McKim's original design.”
  The result was a “modernistic, clamshell-shaped, sawtooth-edged, fluorescent-bathed ticket counter” in the center of Penn Station's monumental – but, by then, soot-streaked and grimy – Main Waiting Room. Erected at a cost of $2 million, Tichy's “Clamshell” housed a new-fangled electronic ticket center that was “supposed to convince passengers that railroading was as modern as flying.” “The glowing fluorescent curve under the soiled classical space was like a jet plane next to a grimy locomotive,” wrote architectural historian Christopher Gray.
  Today, some remember Tichy's “Clamshell” as a “luminous,” “soaring,” and “swooping” example of mid-century modern design. But to others, such as historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford, the “Clamshell” was a “great treason” to Penn Station's design.
  Mumford speculated the Pennsylvania Railroad plopped Tichy's clamshell in the center of Penn Station's “otherwise uninterrupted grand axi[s]” to provide “justification” for “destroying the station from the inside.” 
  The Railroad did ultimately demolish Penn Station in an “[e]pic [a]ct of [c]ivic [v]andalism,” and many now agree Tichy's “Clamshell” was “a nail in the station's coffin” and “the final insult to McKim, Mead & White’s heroic 1910 station.” Tichy “brutally raped” the station, concluded architect B. Sumner Gruzen.
caption: New York Penn Station's Main Waiting Room as it originally appeared in 1911. The Pennsylvania Railroad would eventually install Tichy's “Clamshell” under the archway at left.
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