Penn Station

Good design creates spaces with intended effects. Public spaces are more interesting than private in that the design is not limited to the whims of the individual, but reflect the collective attitudes and feelings of the culture coursing through that particular time. In this sense, public spaces serve as time capsules into reading the values prevalent when the space was built, and in so doing can be used to measure how far we have come, or how far we have moved backwards as a society.

A magnificent station, such as the original Penn, could only have been built during the optimism carried over from the 19th century rationalists. How else could one explain the 277-foot long waiting room designed to resemble the Roman Baths of Caracalla and the Basilica of Constantine?

The building itself wasn't torn down in 1964 in so much as the rationalist world view which created it.

Lorraine B. Diehl, in her comprehensive history of Penn Station, The Late Great Pennsylvania Station:, writes:

"...the first of the six stone eagles that guarded the entrance was coaxed from its aerie and lowered to the ground. The captive bird was surrounded by a group of officials wearing hard hats. They clustered about their trophy and smiled for photographers. Once the servants of the sun, symbols of immortality, the stone birds that had perched atop the station now squatted on a city street, penned in by sawhorses as their station came around them."