(The following story by Tom Feeney Appeared on the Star-Ledger website on June 7.)
NEWARK, N.J. — Charles McAtee knows how much commuters hate New York Penn Station. They take it out on him every day.
By the tens of thousands, they arrive at America’s busiest train station each morning, slog along the dim subterranean concourses and climb cheek-to-jowl and briefcase-to-BlackBerry up the staircases and escalators into Midtown Manhattan. That’s where McAtee waits with a smile on his face and a bundle of newspapers under his arm.
McAtee’s job is to hawk the newspaper AM New York. Though the paper is free, it’s not an easy sell. Many of the harried commuters he approaches step around him as if he were a puddle of something they didn’t want on their shoes.
“People can get mean when they’re passing through here,” McAtee said matter-of-factly one morning last week as he stood among the madding crowd on the sidewalk near Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street. “There’s nothing you can do but deal with it.”
This basement-level entrance to America’s greatest city has been making commuters mean for two generations now, but changes are afoot. A new entrance being built will help New Jersey commuters duck the crowds. And a long-stalled plan is moving quickly ahead to turn the historic post office across the street into a train station befitting the city it serves.
Pennsylvania Station once was a great civic space: a grand, soaring, granite edifice with 150-foot ceilings and a waiting room designed to suggest the Roman Baths of Caracalla.
But the part of the building above ground was lopped off in 1963 to clear the way for Madison Square Garden. What was left was essentially one very large, very busy subway station where nearly 600,000 commuters are delivered every day by NJ Transit, the Long Island Rail Road, Amtrak and the New York City Transit Authority.
“It’s dark. It’s crowded. And it smells. There isn’t much to like,” Robert J. Moody, a systems manager who travels to the city on a Northeast Corridor train from Princeton Junction, said as he took the first sip from a cup of coffee he bought at a shop on the NJ Transit concourse.
Moody said he fights a crowd to get off his train, fights a crowd to get up the steps from the platform to the concourse, and fights a crowd just for a spot on the escalator that carries him up to street level. That wait for the escalator can be three or four minutes during the peak period in the morning. By the time Moody reaches McAtee and the other hawkers, he said, he doesn’t have the energy to be polite.
“Penn Station is an urban-design and transportation-planning disaster,” said Tom Wright, another Northeast Corridor commuter and executive director of the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit planning agency. “The greatest transportation hub in North America is a cramped, crowded basement. Really, it’s no way to enter a city.”
A PORTAL OF THEIR OWN
Wright said he has found the daily indignities easier to bear of late because of the genuine hope they will be short-lived.
The best hope for immediate relief for NJ Transit riders is an entrance under construction at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 31st Street. The $14 million project will provide access directly to NJ Transit’s concourse.
More than 140,000 passenger trips are made into and out of Penn Station every day aboard trains on NJ Transit’s Northeast Corridor, North Jersey Coast Line and Mid-Town Direct lines. The number has more than quadrupled since 1984.
About 70 percent of the NJ Transit passengers use the busy entrance at Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street, the agency says. The new entrance will be one block to the south. Most commuters head east and north when they leave Penn Station, so the new entrance will put them a block farther from their offices. But it will give them a way to avoid the crush of humanity at the main entrance.
“This should give our people some relief,” NJ Transit Executive Director Richard Sarles said. “They’ll be able to avoid those crowds.”
A decade from now, NJ Transit plans to open a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River. The existing tunnel, 100 years old, can handle only 23 trains an hour.
The population west of the Hudson — in New Jersey and Rockland and Orange counties in New York — is expected to grow 72 percent over the next 25 years, and the number of jobs in New York is expected to grow by nearly 350,000. The new rail tunnel — part of a $7.2billion program called Access to the Region’s Core — would help meet the growing demand for travel into the city.
In addition to the tunnel, the ARC plans include expanding Penn Station to a concourse running deep below 34th Street, Sarles said. The expanded station will provide riders with access to PATH trains and the Seventh Avenue, Eighth Avenue and Broadway lines of the New York Subway System. The project, which awaits approvals and funding decisions from the federal government, is expected to be complete around 2017.
GOING POSTAL
Before that happens, the Penn Station that commuters love to hate may become just a memory. Twenty years ago, Sen. Patrick Moynihan of New York began championing the idea of converting the historic James A. Farley Post Office across 8th Avenue from Penn Station into a grand train depot. The plan has languished, and Moynihan died four years ago.
New York state, through its Empire State Development Corp., finally closed on the $230million purchase of the building this spring, ESDC press secretary Errol Cockfield said.
The post office will be converted into a train station, Cockfield said. The tracks that run through Penn Station already run beneath Eighth Avenue, a vestige of the days when mail was delivered by rail.
“We envision a station in the tradition of Grand Central Station,” Cockfield said.
The new station will be part of a larger makeover for the area. The ESDC is negotiating with private developers on a plan that probably will include a new Madison Square Garden, to be built in the annex of the Farley Post Office, and more than 5 million square feet of new office space on the spot where the Garden stands now.
Details of the plan have not been made public because the negotiations are continuing, Cockfield said.
Wright, of the Regional Plan Association, said he expects the city to end up with two new train stations: one in the Farley Post Office building that will be known as Moynihan Station West and one above the existing Penn Station that will be known as Moynihan Station East.
“In 10 years or so, if we’re lucky, we’ll have two train stations nicer than the one we have now,” Wright said.
Charles McAtee can only hope the commuters will be nicer, too.