The Destruction of Penn Station

Marco Taccini


A Brilliant, Remarkable Book   April 4, 2001
 13 out of 13 found this review helpful

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.


Stark, uncompromising look at a civic tragedy.   March 31, 2001
 24 out of 24 found this review helpful

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?