Customer Reviews

The Destruction of Penn Station

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As most readers, i have never seen the "real" Pennsylvania Station. I am not even American, i am from Rome, Italy. The excellent photography by Peter Moore will take you slowly through the "deconstruction".. (yes, no wrecking ball or explosives used here) of Mc Kim's masterpiece. It is really hard to believe (please excuse my english) that such a beautiful and well engineered masterpiece was gronund to dust. I have read books from Lorraine Diehl and William Middleton about the Station so i know what it used to be. Times have luckily changed, and many beautiful structures are standing today, thanks to the demise of Penn Station. Although hearthbreaking, these pictures also reflect the mood of the early sixties, when such a masterpiece was considered expendable in change for a station that today looks like a suburban bus terminal and for a sports Arena that is constantly on the verge of meeting the wrecking ball and of negligible beauty , compared with what stood there previously. On my weekly commute to Termini (the main railway station in Rome) the bus takes me by the baths of Diocletian.. and there it is.. the Concourse!.. which sends me cold shivers down my spine! If you love New York, just as i love it, as a foreigner, do not miss this book!

Marco Taccini

Last week the Russian space agency mercifully, somewhat reluctantly, destroyed the Mir space station, a relic from the old Soviet Union, after a fifteen-year odyssey in earth orbit. The orbiting outpost's passing was marked by sadness, regret, reflection, even cries of protest, from space veterans and enthusiasts across the globe.

If only the same sentiments had been applied to a different station nearly 40 years ago. Like Mir, Pennsylvania Station was a marvel in its time, an unparalleled achievement of contemporary technology; but like Mir, it became a relic, a symbol of a bygone era in a time when the world preferred to look forward; a costly "white elephant" that had to come down to save money. Sadly, though, while Mir served five times its intended lifespan in space, Pennsylvania Station was built to last for centuries but stood for a mere fifty years. Despite its importance as an architectural achievement, despite its majestic, awesome beauty merged with ingenious functionality, despite Charles McKim's unabashed use of rich materials and classical influence, when the indifferent City of New York decided to allow the bankrupt Pennsylvania Railroad to sacrifice its greatest urban depot, there was little of the sadness, regret and reflection that marked the demise of Mir. Only after the tons of granite and marble had been pulverized into landfill and dumped in the New Jersey Meadowlands, and the new Madison Square Garden rose in all of its concrete-and-plastic splendor above the cramped, squalid remains of McKim's masterpiece, did New Yorkers realize what they had lost.

Fortunately, one New Yorker did care, enough to take himself and his camera into the hazardous demolition zones inside Penn Station (without a hardhat, no less, according to the accompanying text) and record for posterity the gradual yet inexorable progress of the "monumental act of public vandalism." Seeing those magnificent interiors crumble to dust, the steel structure stripped bare of its stone sheathing, the rich Travertine marble and Milford granite lying in ruins, and most of all that breathtaking steel-and-glass concourse roof, the likes of which may never be seen again, broken and demolished, must have filled Mr. Moore with the same feeling the rest of us get while viewing his photos: How, and why, could anyone have let this happen?

I remember as a kid in the mid-70s taking the train to NYC and having to endure the commuter's nightmare known as "modern" Penn Station.

In the late 80s, I learned what once was on the site of the current MSG/Penn Station monstrosity and became appalled that people could let a beautiful work of art be dismantled and replaced with a horrible building. In the early 1990s, I learned about the 1950s and 1960s and how Americans were obsessed with all things modern and new, rejecting anything with a hint of age or ornament.

Moore & Moore take a pictorial look on how the McKim, Mead and White's neoclassical masterpiece was dismantled over a multi-year period in the mid-1960s. While they really don't go into detail on why the old Penn Station was demolished, the spooky, B & W photos tell more than how an architectural gem was demolished. On a deeper level, the photos tell the tale of how an entire city was becoming irrelevant to suburban America and was sinking into massive decline (the years of municipal bankrupcy and burning neighborhoods in the South Bronx are only a few years away).

It was a very sad book that gets more depressing with each turn of the page, as more and more of the beauty of the old Penn Station gets stripped away. I guess that was the power of the photographs working on me.

Pair this book up with Robert Caro's _The Power Broker_ to get a good picture of New York in the early Baby Boom era.

This a rare, photo-based book that really matters. Moore's photographs are at once beautiful, haunting, and shocking. They lucidly document the unbearable destruction of a great landmark. This beautifully designed and conceptualized book serves as a stunning cautionary-tale, told in photographs and words. Why do we accept the destruction of our own history? How could such a thing have happened in a progressive city like New York? In the august pages of this book lie the answers to these questions and more. Peter Moore has documented an American tragedy. His wife, Barbara Moore--a important historian and archivist in her own right--has contextualized these images in new and surprising ways. The fine essays give even greater intellectual and emotional depth to the book. A significant work that deserves many readers.

Of course we know how this story ends, with the destruction of the wonderous Pennsylvania Station to meake room for the mediocre Madison Square Garden and office tower sitting on the site today. Despite this, it is still shocking to see the actual photos documenting the deconstruction of the building. Moore's evocotative photos take us inside the site and you can almost taste the dust in the air. When I first read this book I took my copy of Lorraine Diehl's "Late, Great Pennsylvalia Station" off the shelf and reaized that Moore's book stands as a sad coda to hers. Although Diehl covers the destruction of the station in her book, the detail in "The Destruction..." really forms a mirror image to her pictures of the station being built. The sad fact is that looking at the photos in Moore's book backward makes more sense than they do forward, but alas its not to be.

This is an extraordinary, heartbreaking, must have book for anyone who loves New York and/or McKim, Mead & White's work.

Photographer Peter Moore and his wife Barbara moved into the Penn Station neighborhood in the early sixties. They used the building every day, whether they were passing through to the subway or catching a bite in the cavernous coffee shop.

With the railroad's permission, they documented its slow dismantling over the four years from 1963-1967. This book is the first appearance of that work. The black and white pictures are arranged chronologically, showing the faded but still magnificent station from its last days of active use through to its ghostly presence as a metal shell. The photography is beautiful and lyrical and sad beyond words, like a mournful love song to a love lost. The picures of the rubble-filled waiting room, its shape still intact but its side walls gone, are especially hard to take.

One note: this is not an exhaustive review of the building and its various spaces. It is a chrono picture of the concourse and waiting room through through their destruction. For more pics of the station in use, try "The Late, Great, Pennsylvania Station."

I am one of the generation of New Yorkers that have grown up with the ghost of the old Penn station - and its unfortunate replacement. We have been forever robbed of this stately thing, which was so much more than a building. Watching it's slow death in these haunting pictures makes me hope this is the last time we have used our imagination to destroy rather than build. (This is an especially painful irony in light of our recent tragedy.) Get this book, and look at it with your children. And may we never treat the human-made beauty around us with such contempt again.

This book just takes your breathe away, the images are so vivid and shocking. How on earth could anyone sign off on destroying this colossel beauty, it's something I just can't get my mind around. I am so grateful that this was documented, as hard as it is too look at, people need witness these pictures to make sure it does not happen again. Many people credit the outrage over the razing of this McKim, Mead, and White masterpiece with helping save Carnige Hall and Grand Central, which though appreciated, does not lessen the sadness over the loss of this New York City treasure, it really is such a tragic loss. I highly recommend this book for its text, great visuals, and the power is thought it provoks: great book.

This book is designed more for the individual with some knowledge of the history of Pennyslvania Station in New York City. The photos of the station during the 1963-1966 period of its demolition are melancholy in nature, stark and grating on the nerves. If you ever saw the station while it was still in service, you cannot help but be moved by this pictorial look during its demise. It is a good lesson for the younger generation, too, because it shows what can be lost by historical neglect of our architectural treasures.

This book is a treasure. Peter's work is timeless, lyrical and reverent. There are no words that can fully convey the madness of misguided, greedy men with no regard for the beauty, magnificence and sacred structure--indeed the vibrance of spirit--that was the original Penn Station. However, Peter Moore's elegant and touching photographs, along with the eloquence of his wife Barbara, Eric Nash and Lorraine Diehl, at least allow a brief visit into this most inspiring treasure which once graced New York City and America. While the potential of the next-store Farley Post Office (designed by the same architects of Penn Station) one day becoming the "new" Penn Station on one level could be seen as a step in the right direction, it would never begin to capture the spirit and thoughtful, functional beauty of the original Penn. If I was a billionaire today, one thing I'd plan and do with joy: buy and raze the eye/soulsore of Madison Square Garden and the ugly modern buildings on the site and REBUILD the original Penn Station: stone-for-stone, as faithfully as possible. Talk about a massive world-wide amplification of tourists and revenue to New York City---to say nothing of doing the right thing for the massive and growing number of passengers through Penn who never saw the original masterpiece. Who's with me?!? Let's do it!! In the meantime, buy this book, pour yourself a glass of Bully Hill Love My Goat Red, and journey with Peter back to a magical, bygone time that we can restore in our hearts and ought to restore in our world...