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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.
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 30th 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.