Penn Station’s History in Four Minutes or Less

Since my father’s extent of Internet usage lies strictly in combing eBay for rogue AMC car parts, I can reveal that I purchased him a book about the creation of Penn Station for Father’s Day.

I, of course, had to read it before I forked it over, as 99% of my life’s grievances spring eternal from the catacombs that are that god forsaken rail depot.

The back story is that Penn came as a necessity to get the folks from a not-dirty-yet Jersey and the Island of Long to the big city. So, they figured out the best place to buy some land, and build a sick station.

In 1900, people actually lived in brownstones where the H&M flagship store is, which boggles my mind. People sold them to the Pennsylvania RR for dirt cheap, except for one bitch who demanded top dollar. Good for her.

The LIRR sucked just as much then as it did now, which is a relief to know that I didn’t miss out on anything 100 years ago. The RR terminated somewhere before, well, the river, and one detrained to take a LIRR ferry to Manhattan, which is just funny to say.

Tunnels from the NY and Jersey sides were dug respectively and expected to perfectly meet up underwater. (As you do.) “Sandhogs,” as they were called, dug out muck and reenforced tunnel walls until this finally happened.

The only thing keeping these poor underpaid dudes alive was air pressure. Many got the bends from leaving the job site too quickly, so the advice they were given was to not get wasted while working. I, too, try to adopt that same mantra — except when I’m working with XML files.

When they finally got within a close proximity, team NY beat NJ (obviously), and the latter slid congratulatory cigars to the winners through a pipe. They were less than a quarter of an inch off from both tunnels aligning perfectly, which I’m sure someone’s wife painstakingly sewed onto a commemorative shirt afterwards.

Penn Station was built to hold an ambitious amount of passengers, yet never planned for any subway lines to connect to it. (Whoops.) Still, it would be a spectacle for all to enjoy when it first opened, featuring restaurants and shops … and kinda sounding JUST LIKE GRAND CENTRAL NOW. In fact, a French tourist wept upon witnessing the beauty of the station, whereas now drunk underage tweens do this at 4 am after missing the infamous “last” train, and are forced to sleep on the floor.

On the premiere service day to Penn, LIRR travelers boarded at Jamaica Station to their new destination. This cut commuting times by half. A fight broke out when several monthly ticket passengers refused to pay the (surprise!) newly added fair to the conductor. Angry patrons stood in line for hours to exchange tickets. The LIRR’s response? “At least no one was injured today.”

The brilliant architects who built Penn will later be best known for shitty stuff happening to them, namely getting shot and killed at old Madison Square Garden (also their design) by the angered husband of their lady love (see: “Ragtime”). This building would later be torn down (currently the site of World Wide Plaza), so that it could be rebuilt anew on top of the then sold air rights to Penn Station to accommodate professional mediocre hockey and basketball teams and Billy Joel concerts, and whatever those people who work at One Penn Plaza do. They also were responsible for the second iteration of the Garden City Hotel, which, oops, fell victim to some mysterious arson in 1889 — all while looters drunkenly ransacked the wine cellar as the building burned. At 8 am. (Always happy hour somewhere, right?)

When the current abysmal hell that is Penn Station was built in the ’60s, apparently mimicking the style of “airport sleekness,” nothing was preserved. Cause, after all, who had heard of a “national landmark” in the days of Don Draper? Plus, people had cars now. And the 50-year-old hand-painted glass was dusty and WHO wants THAT? Marble columns and statues were smashed and disposed of in a heap next to the Meadowlands. We now have Tracks Raw Bar & Grill and not one, but two Smoothie Kings.

As I begin my miserable new commute next week to the East side, I think of the machines that are currently doing the same digging work the sandhogs did 100 years ago, and ponder why we can have cool guitar shit on the Google homepage, but no East side access till 2016. But, hey, at least no one got hurt today. (Yet.)