By Philip Newman
The on-and-off project to move Penn Station, though which thousands of Queens commuters pass daily, from beneath Madison Square Garden to the James A. Farley Post Office across the street appears to be on once again.
Mayor Bloomberg has appointed former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who shepherded through Congress legislation to provide money for the move, and former U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari (R- Staten Island) to the project committee.
Completion of the deal with the Postal Service has not yet been finalized, but both sides expressed optimism that it would go through so that construction on renovating the post office could begin.
“We are making progress,” said Charles Gargano, chairman of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corp., overseeing the project.
Diane Todd of the Postal Service said that negotiations “are moving along well.”
The project has been estimated to cost from $500 million to $780 million and Bloomberg said the construction would create more than 7,000 jobs.
Bloomberg said the present station, which he called “a dreary, subterranean failure,” serves more than 600,000 people a day and long ago ran out of space. The new station, across the street on the far side of Eighth Avenue on Manhattan’s west side, would accommodate 30 percent more passengers.
For the multitudes from both Queens and Nassau and Suffolk Counties, their place of arrival and departure was for decades even more grim. Until renovations in recent years, the Long Island Rail Road station was a second-level below that of Amtrak with glaring lighting, peeling paint and a temporary look.
Moynihan once called the destruction of the original Pennsylvania station between 1962 and 1964 “the great act of vandalism in the history of the city.” It was a major issue that led to establishment of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The original station, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad at Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street, was designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White and opened in 1910. The station, with 150-foot-high ceilings and a row of Tuscan columns fronting Seventh Avenue, was modeled to an extent, on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome and hailed an architectural jewel.
The Farley Post Office is of the same era as the original Penn Station and it, too, has a row of giant columns at its front. Surmounting them his the motto of the Postal Service: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
