Pennsylvania Station

Photo Library of Congress, between 1910-1920

The Pennsylvania Station in New York

Is like some vast basilica of old

That towers above the terror of the dark

As bulwark and protection to the soul.

Now people who are hurrying alone

And those who come in crowds from far away

Pass through this great concourse of steel and stone

To trains, or else from trains out into day.

And as in great basilicas of old

The search was ever for a dream of God,

So here the search is still within each soul

Some seed to find to root in earthly sod,

Some seed to find that sprouts a holy tree

To glorify the earth—and you—and me.

Langston Hughes

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/rebuild-penn-station-and-rectify-a-crime-against-architecture/

“The original Pennsylvania Station, {1910-1963} colloquially referred to as “Penn Station,” was eight acres of Gilded Age American opulence. It was the brainchild of Alexander Cassatt, the owner of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1910, who wanted to bring a rail terminal to Manhattan. At the time, passengers needed to take a ferry across the Hudson River from the railroad’s terminus in Jersey City. But New York City was rapidly expanding, and Cassatt wanted a preluding portal to the city that would give passengers a taste of the majesty awaiting them.

Cassatt wanted something Roman in grandeur, and he chose Charles McKim, of the legendary architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White, as the man for the job.

McKim and Cassatt had a febrile fixation on creating the greatest railroad station the world had ever seen, and it would be difficult to argue that they did not deliver on this ambitious promise: Penn Station would later be immortalized in anecdotes that are recited with a fable-like mysticism and in poems that capture the ethos of optimism that the Station symbolized. Langston Hughes described it as “some vast basilica of old / That towers above the terror of the dark / As bulwark and protection of the soul.” McKim envisioned something vast. He took inspiration from the “old.” The Station’s gaping, 150-foot waiting room was modeled after the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, built with Milford pink granite, honeycomb coffered ceilings, mighty marble columns, and windows allowing light to pour in from its vertiginous height. To enter New York City via Penn Station was to enter it like a god, architecture historian Vincent Scully once remarked.”

Chattanooga Choo Choo, Glenn Miller

https://youtu.be/V2aj0zhXlLA