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I don’t know how it hap­pened, but I’m feel­ing pretty lucky to have stum­bled onto this lit­tle his­tory les­son from Lib­er­ace on the prove­nance of Beethoven’s Moon­light Sonata. Play it below or fol­low this link.

Beethoven’s Moon­light Sonata -…

View of Penn Sta­tion from the North­east, ca. 1911.

On read­ing my prior Penn Sta­tion post, my sis­ter in law told me about a pro­fes­sor she had who spoke of Penn Sta­tion this way:

You used to stroll through it like a Roman and now you scut­tle below it like a rat. That’s it, I can’t speak of this more today.

I’m para­phras­ing, but I that’s pretty much the idea, I would say. What was his name again?

Also, just gen­er­ally on the topic of real estate devel­op­ers. I’ve been read­ing Gotham, which is the his­tory of New York City, which is, more or less, the his­tory of real estate devel­op­ers. I’m not switch­ing sides on this issue, but they’re more impor­tant to our eco­nomic eco-​​system than I think we give them credit for. Not that don’t totally destroy some pretty price­less stuff.

One of my co-​​workers was quite a busy dig­i­tal tech before the crash and we were talk­ing about how it got pro­gres­sively more dif­fi­cult after Novem­ber ’08 to sus­tain a free­lance sit­u­a­tion. She sort of won­dered aloud why it was that some peo­ple worked straight through it and, in fact, are still work­ing in the indus­try despite the fact that so many peo­ple, includ­ing the two of us, more or less dropped out for the time being for a less rel­e­vant (if not more sta­ble) pur­suit. I’ve been watch­ing a lot of doc­u­men­taries on the mil­i­tary chan­nel lately, and it struck me that there’s some­thing of a par­al­lel in the ran­dom­ness of it all.

“It’s kind of like war,” I said. “A lot of peo­ple get shot, but some don’t.”

Now that I’ve writ­ten that down and re-​​read it, I real­ize that it’s actu­ally a wildly offen­sive claim for me to make. War is the only thing like war with Haiti com­ing in a not-​​too-​​distant sec­ond. Any­thing even approach­ing such an excru­ci­at­ing real­ity is unfath­omable, espe­cially given that I have a job and it’s pretty great. Not to men­tion that, in my case, cos­mic ran­dom­ness played merely a sup­port­ing role to irre­spon­si­bil­ity when it comes to my will­ful (and hope­fully tem­po­rary) exile from the photo scene.

But tak­ing my own stu­pid sit­u­a­tion out of it, the unem­ploy­ment stakes are a bit like the trenches in the sense that there’s not nec­es­sar­ily a rea­son why one per­son works and another per­son doesn’t when they’ve both gone about things in more or less the same way.

Any­way, these are the things I think of when I spend my evenings dig­ging though the Library of Con­gress online stacks with the War in Europe rag­ing over my shoulder.

Penn R.R. Sta­tion from Gim­bel Shop, New York, ca. 1910 – 1915

If you’ve ever taken AmTrak from one North­east­ern city to another, there’s a pretty good chance that your trip both began and ended at Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tion. The biggest and most famous Penn Sta­tion is here in New York, of course but Philadel­phia has one and Newark does too. When it was first built, Union Sta­tion (another com­mon sta­tion name) in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. was referred to as Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tion as well. Here’s the expla­na­tion: the stretch of track between D.C. and Boston now referred to as the North­east Cor­ri­dor was once the Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road. The name“Penn Sta­tion” is really short­hand for Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road Sta­tion, which, of course, all these sta­tions were.

The President’s room, new Penn­syl­va­nia [i.e. Union] Station, Washington, D.C.

Any­way, perus­ing the Library of Con­gress Prints and Pho­tographs Online Cat­a­log with the search term “penn­syl­va­nia sta­tion” yields inter­est­ing and var­ied results. There are only a cou­ple large, archival images avail­able on the web of the poised, intri­cate Penn Sta­tion as it was, before it was trag­i­cally lev­eled to make way for Madi­son Square Garden.

Main Con­course, Penn Sta­tion, New York City, ca. 1911.

Broad Street Sta­tion in Philadel­phia (later to be replaced by Philly’s Penn Sta­tion) was a sim­i­larly grand struc­ture to its New York sib­ling and would share the same fate. It was demol­ished in 1953 and is now the site of the archi­tec­turally for­get­table Penn Plaza just next door to City Hall.

Pro­mo­tional mate­r­ial for Broad Street Sta­tion, Philadel­phia, ca 1893

Dur­ing World War II, the Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road and it’s var­i­ous sta­tions were vital for shift­ing troops and sup­plies. The var­i­ous Penn Sta­tions began to get out­fit­ted with some pretty fab­u­lously mid-​​century accom­mo­da­tions. Below, Broad Street Station’s Ser­vice Women’s Lounge.

Ser­vice Women’s Lounge, Broad Street Sta­tion, 1944

Ser­vice Women’s Lounge, Broad Street Sta­tion, 1944

Ser­vice Women’s Lounge, Broad Street Sta­tion, 1944

Ser­vice Women’s Lounge, Broad Street Sta­tion, 1944

Ser­vice Women’s Lounge, Broad Street Sta­tion, 1944

In much the same vein, the Penn Sta­tion that replaced Broad Street (now called 30^th St. Sta­tion) in Philadel­phia had a gleam­ing new “cock­tail room,” com­plete with a cowhide bar, now also just a memory.

Cock­tail Room, Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tion, Philadel­phia, 1944

Penn Sta­tion in Har­ris­burg, PA had at one time a pretty remark­able USO “Can­teen and Lounge”.

Penn Sta­tion, Har­ris­burg, 1943

Penn Sta­tion, Har­ris­burg, 1943

Penn Sta­tion, Har­ris­burg, 1943

It’s pretty easy to rail against devel­op­ers who come along with some grand plan to squeeze greater prof­its out of a given piece of land. These are the guys that traded in old Penn Sta­tion for the blight of the Gar­den and the sprawl­ing and con­fused labyrinth of com­muter cor­ri­dors under­neath. How­ever, since pri­vate real estate devel­op­ers are a huge part of what makes New York what is, we don’t need to ban cap­i­tal­ists. We just need pub­lic mech­a­nisms to hault the projects that shouldn’t hap­pen in the first place.

Everybody’s more or less in agree­ment at that raz­ing the orig­i­nal New York Penn Sta­tion was a bad idea. So much so, in fact, that the State of New York and oth­ers have been doing what they can to res­ur­rect it right across the street in the form of Moyni­han Sta­tion. Still, the wrong can’t really be corrected.

All images © Copy­right 2003, Alex McLean.