At the junction
Jun 24, 2009 Americana, Heart and spirit, Metropolis, Style
My first reaction when I saw this post on a blog called Infrastructurist (looks very cool) (via Boing Boing) was just to link to it on my Facebook page. I also lament the loss of these great — well, in some cases very large and grandiose, if not necessarily actually great — civic works of sculpture. I come to work, in fact, through the new Penn Station every day, and work in One Penn Plaza (yeah, me and those buildings!), overlooking (actually, straddling) the non-entity of a transport hub that now bears the Pennsylvania Station name as well as the depressing Madison Square Garden.
Then I went ahead and wrote this comment, and decided to recycle and touch it up a little here, for the benefit of my larger other audience.
To a large extent the manner in which the loss of these temples of transit compels so many of us is a testament to what we really think about a world ruled solely by utilitarian concerns. That latter, callous attitude toward the spiritual importance of environment on human existence, in the cities as much as anywhere else, is displayed by Alon Levy in the comments at the original post.
God help us in the soulless, bottom-line libertarian future that so many think they want!
Ironically, the utilitarian worldview is incapable of accounting for the long-term utility and welfare (in the microeconomics sense of the word) that derive from civic pride — the decline of which, from the 1950’s on, along with the decline in the quality of inner city life, surely must be linked to the decline of the humane in urban architecture.
And yet: As the (not so godless?) Alon says in a subsequent comment, “Ron Coleman, you’re the first person I see use the word spirituality to mean ‘preserving train station facades.’” Indeed: Many of these buildings were and are obsolete, and the cost of their respective upkeep, utility expense, restoration or retrofit, relevance to modern transportation need or all of the above would constitute a preposterous budget item for almost any public entity saddled with such costs. Only religious dogma, and perhaps theocracy, could justify such devotion.
Rail transport, despite its highly romantic appeal, is great for everyday commuting but is seldom of the choice of travelers from afar, for whom flying — even in its own diminished state as a culture and a humane experience — is a clearly superior choice. Most other travel remains, in America, highway-based, because Americans want to go where they want, when they want and with whom they want, and they want to get back home that way, too.
In addition, the cheap labor and lax or nonexistent building, fire, safety and access standards of the nineteenth century, which made it possible to erect and use these behemoths, are truly relics of a different age. So who is going to foot the bills to maintain these buildings as obsolete white elephants? Or is someone here volunteering for a special tax assessment so Detroiters can stare at their irrelevant grand terminal?
There’s the facts, Jacks.
I sure wish we had the old Penn Station here, though.
June 26th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Ron, American inner cities declined for many reasons, few of which are about civic pride or humane buildings. The urban renewal czars’ sin was to destroy communities based on what they believed was how a city ought to look. Jane Jacobs referred to that view, which created monstrosities like Lincoln Center and World Trade Center, as trying to make cities look like art pieces.
Art pieces, of course, have no community of people who have to live in them. Nor do they object when they’re drawn in a certain way. They don’t object when parts of them are torn into pieces to build freeways, or when they’re redlined. They’re there to look pretty, not to speak for themselves.
In fact, the urban renewal czars could and did say, with some justification, that they were destroying slums, with bad social mores, and grim, unlit buildings. To this day, New York’s housing projects have better lighting than its tenements. Ironically, train stations in the style of Grand Central and the old Penn Station, built to be imposing and to let everyone know how grand the railway is, have a lot more in common with projects than with brownstones.
In the other thread, some other commenters quoted Jane Jacobs as saying that with the destruction of Penn Station, people came into New York as rats rather than kings. I haven’t read anything in Jacobs that complains about the new Penn Station, at all. This quote is most likely from Lewis Mumford, who was a fan of urban renewal as long as it was in the style he approved of. Demolishing several blocks on the Upper West Side to make room for Lincoln Center was okay with him (that’s how he thought cities could compete with the Interstate Highway-subsidized suburbs for middle class residents); demolishing one train station to build another was not.
June 26th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Alon, I can’t think of anything in your comment here I disagree with. You are very insightful. On the other hand I am not clear as to the point of your second paragraph.
What’s your view of Robert Moses?
June 29th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I don’t see how the gratuitous slam at libertarians belongs with the rest of the post, which otherwise focuses on utilitarians.
Libertarians argue that train stations ought to be privatized, not that they ought to be ugly.
July 6th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
No slam at libertarianism is gratuitous!