The Price Of Salving New York’s Architectural Conscience Is An Uninspired Matchbox (And $1 Billion!)

It’s not clear whether Sheldon Silver’s intransigence is due to the removal of the original roof trusses, but the Times’ David Dunlap notes that plans for the proposed Moynihan Station have changed over the years:

To judge from architectural renderings, the design is much less imaginative than it was two years ago, and far more utilitarian.

It has been easy to lose track of the design in recent months. The political battle over Penn Station between the Republican governor and the Democratic speaker has demanded attention. So has the real estate intrigue over the future of Madison Square Garden, which may also move into the Farley building, permitting an expansive renovation of the station in its current location. All of this is complicated by the prospect of a new governor.

But design is critical in what would be one of the most important public spaces created in New York in a generation. Its name, Moynihan Station, would commemorate Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who cared deeply about civic architecture. And many New Yorkers probably don’t realize how much the plans have changed.

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The best-known design for Moynihan Station, by David M. Childs and his colleagues at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (architects of the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site), was unveiled in 1999. It would have involved removing the sorting room floor and creating a multilevel concourse in which passengers waiting above could glimpse the train movements below. The original roof trusses would have been preserved under a new skylight.

Last year, that was supplanted by a design from James Carpenter Design Associates and Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum. Their plans showed a single-level hall under an undulating skylight supported on slender columns. This was intended to evoke the concourse of the original Penn Station by McKim, Mead & White.

This year, Skidmore returned with the sparest design yet: a single-level hall under a barrel-vaulted skylight. Absent any other bold architectural flourishes, it seems to defer to the original facades facing the inner court, which are historic but aesthetically undistinguished. After all, they were never really meant to be seen.

“I remain partial to the more ambitious (and expensive) scheme,” said Prof. Hilary Ballon of Columbia University, an architectural historian who devoted 45 pages to the original Skidmore project in her 2002 book, “New York’s Pennsylvania Stations.”

Eric Marcus, an author who was working on his own book about the reconstruction of Penn Station until the development project became hopelessly delayed, described the latest version of the train hall as an “uninspired matchbox covered with a glass roof.”