Nearly a half-century has passed since the destruction of the great 1910 station designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White, a “monumental act of vandalism”
To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.
“One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat,” is the familiar lament from Vincent J. Scully Jr., the Yale architectural historian, about the difference between the former and present Penn Stations.
- MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
