In last week’s Sunday Times, Michael Kimmelman urges his city to hasten the replacement of “the
calamity that is Penn Station.” Its contrast with Grand Central Station is
indeed stunning; one scurries, head down, through Penn Station’s
indistinguishable corridors, while the airy heights of Grand Central create a
sense of wonder and scale that evokes the best of the urban experience.
But when the trains do finally switch over to the reinvented
Post Office Building next door (and it sounds as if this will not happen for
quite some time, nor even that commuter rail will join Amtrak in the new
building), something very distinctive about a certain era of New York will be
lost. Today, we wonder how the city could possibly have razed the old, glorious
Pennsylvania Station, but Kimmelman allows that it “had declined by the end
into a symbol of gilded age opulence.” Penn Station will never attain beauty or
even charm, but its modernist labyrinth is typical of an era whose
architectural legacy, now so utterly out of fashion, is fast being erased from
the landscape.
I can think of several similar, if smaller-scale, landmarks
in my own life that are on their way out. One of the high schools, Newton
North, in my hometown was recently replaced by a new, far more functional
building hyped as the first “green” high school in the country. The old
building was a monstrosity best suited for a prison, but it was
nothing if not distinctive – a dead ringer for the school where those eighties teens served detention in The Breakfast Club. The school where I currently work is slowly
replacing its functional but dull annex that rose in the sixties. And, on a
street a couple blocks from my apartment, a Safeway dating from the late fifties will soon make way
for a much larger grocery, itself only one section of a mixed-use
development.
These buildings matter. They demonstrate the limits of
planning and the inexorable ability of history to compromise practicality and
aesthetic appeal. In conversation the other day, an acquaintance of mine
pointed out how Safeway’s new mixed-use shopping complex will promote health by
encouraging shoppers to walk and bike to the store. I don’t disagree, but the
people who planned the old store thought the same thing, except that cars and
convenience were the determinants of well-being during their era. The heyday of
modernist optimism was particularly heady – tragically so – and when it is no
longer around us to remind us of its failures, we risk repeating its mistakes.
Penn Station represents that bleak but fascinating nadir in New York’s recent history: the seventies. Its
tunnels are a dystopian landscape, devoid of anything organic or decorative
beyond advertisements. Its austere functionality reflected, even exacerbated
the dire situation of the city as it descended into anarchic bankruptcy.
Practicality was compromised because the architecture discouraged anyone from
lingering and developing a sense of place. The movie Blade Runner captures this feeling in its chaotic vision of the
future. The best of a legion of sci-fi films that examine a future gone wrong
through the limits of centralized planning, its hero, Deckard, prowls a
crowded, placeless, and sunken streetscape, where the only light is dim and
fluorescent. His world is dead, but when he does finally come across something
vivid and compelling, it is all the more worthwhile.
