Libertarians argue that train stations ought to be privatized, not that they ought to be ugly.

What’s your view of Robert Moses?

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.