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At least they finally have a definite date for construction. A goal to look forward to!
Posts: 510 | From: Richmond VA USA | Registered: Mar 2004
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Still, another alternative plan will be outlined in the Sunday Review (Opinion) section of The Times.
Fair Use:
Train stations are more than just a bunch of platforms for getting places. They’re portals. New York used to have two of the world’s most ennobling entrances, announcing the city in all its ambition and glory, Grand Central Terminal and the old Pennsylvania Station. Half a century ago, it lost the latter to the wrecking ball, getting a shameful rat’s maze instead.
The governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, channeling his inner Robert Moses, has lately been promising to remedy what ails the city’s crumbling transit hubs. And this week he announced a plan to revamp Penn Station. Still entombed beneath Madison Square Garden, it has become the hemisphere’s busiest train station, serving 650,000 riders a day, three times the number it was conceived for — a figure equivalent to the population of Boston. They must stagger through crowded, confusing subterranean passageways to find the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, the subways and Amtrak.
The governor’s initiative prompted editors of The Times’s Op-Ed page to approach Vishaan Chakrabarti, who founded Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a New York architecture firm. Mr. Chakrabarti, who explains his plan in detail below, ran the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and he is a veteran of earlier Penn Station refurbishment proposals. The challenge: Can we go further than what the governor is doing? What would it take to truly transform Penn Station?
Posts: 9976 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
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Funny you should mentione it Richard. On NJT now back to our son's house after a play with our granddaughter. Checked out the sign and prefer the old Solari. Something about the anticipation as it clicked through all the variations. Fun to guess what would show up. Progress, I guess.
Posts: 2397 | From: Camden, SC | Registered: Mar 2006
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To get to New York’s Penn Station, every northbound Amtrak passenger makes the last leg of their journey, through tunnels beneath the Hudson River, in the dark. Trust me: They should be glad. One day this autumn, an Acela pulls into Newark, N.J., and a railway spokesman escorts me onto the rear engine car, where we stand and take in the view facing backward. As we descend into one of the Hudson tunnels—there are two, both 107 years old, finished in the same year the Wright brothers built their first airplane factory—a supervisor flips on the rear headlights, illuminating the ghastly tubes.
Our train (unsurprisingly) is operating at reduced speed because of an electrical glitch, which just gives us more time to gawk at the damage. There are eerie, nearly fluorescent white stains on the tunnel walls that look like they were painted by a giant with a roller brush. The pale swaths are remnants of the salt water that inundated the passages five years ago, during Hurricane Sandy. Sulfates and chlorides have been eating away at the concrete ever since, exposing reinforcement bars underneath. “Keep your eyes peeled,” says Craig Schulz, the affable Amtrak spokesman, “and you’ll see some of these areas where there is literally just crumbling concrete.”
While the points within this article have all been related in the past, the central thought coming to mind remains "how can this Native New Yorker temporarily residing out of town for the next three to seven years turn his back on where he came from?".
But I still hold that outgoing.Gov. Christie "did the right thing" pulling the plug on the badly flawed ARC tunnel plan.
Posts: 9976 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
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