Читать книгу Antiquity in Gotham - Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis - Страница 16

To continue at the forefront of the US economy, if not the global economy, New York City needed better connections to the railroad network that stretched across America. Travel time by train had improved dramatically; by 1902, the journey between Philadelphia and Jersey City only took seventy-nine minutes, down from four and a half hours in 1839.⁴⁶ Yet travelers still had to disembark and transfer to a ferry to cross the Hudson, which took about twenty minutes in good weather, an abysmally slow crossing by contrast.⁴⁷

In 1896, 94 million New York–bound passengers disembarked from trains in Jersey City.⁴⁸ Ferries were not a viable, long-term solution. Nor was the costly construction of a bridge, which might interfere with boat traffic. In June 1899, Alexander Cassatt, the newly elected president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, conceived of constructing a monumental station in New York that would be connected to New Jersey and Long Island via tunnels. Having observed electric-powered trains at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris, he realized that electrified trains could run through the tunnels.

Central to the success of the project would be hiring an architect with the vision to create a station that would match the technical achievements of the tunnels. On April 24, 1902, Cassatt asked Charles McKim of the legendary firm McKim, Mead & White to design the station. The importance of McKim, Mead & White—and its two leading architects Stanford White and McKim—to the development of architecture in New York City can scarcely be overstated. They designed some of the most important buildings ever erected in New York, and they saw classical, especially Roman, architecture as a treasure trove for some of their most brilliant buildings.⁴⁹ Construction started in 1903; McKim stepped back in 1906 due to poor health, and William Symmes Richardson, a partner at the firm, took over. The station occupied eight acres and was located between Thirty-First and Thirty-Third Streets and between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and the railroad yard extended to Tenth Avenue, occupying twenty-eight acres. While being privately funded to the tune of $113 million, Pennsylvania Station was effectively a public ceremonial gateway to New York, reflecting the ambitions of both the city and the railroad.

FIGURE 7. Plan of main bathing block, Baths of Caracalla, Rome.

Source: J. Burden and J. Montgomery, Building History Project.

For his design, McKim drew technical and artistic inspiration from the Baths of Caracalla (inaugurated in 216 CE), perhaps the grandest and most extraordinary of all of the imperial baths ever erected. Bathing was a central Roman cultural institution.⁵⁰ Everyone from the emperor to a lowly freedman visited the public baths on a daily basis. Beginning with the Baths of Agrippa, Roman emperors and their associates had created ever-larger and more impressive complexes to accommodate the large number of daily bathers in Rome and other Roman cities.

The main bath block (702 × 361 feet) of the Baths of Caracalla was set within a complex of gardens, porticos, and other rooms that stood on a massive terrace (Figure 7). The bath block was designed symmetrically around a central axis of rooms, composed of the natatio (swimming pool), frigidarium (room with cold bathing pools), tepidarium (room with tepid bathing pools), and caldarium (room with warm bathing pools).⁵¹ The triple-bayed, cross-vaulted frigidarium (183 × 79 feet), which served as the model for the waiting room of Penn Station, was remarkable in its own right. Its coffered ceilings would have stood 125 feet tall, and natural light would have filtered through the large lunette clerestory windows. Polychrome marbles from across the empire decorated the wall and floors, and columns of Egyptian gray granite and red porphyry stood tall. Colossal sculptures, including the Farnese Hercules, were displayed in the wall niches and upon bases on the floor, contributing to an overall atmosphere of luxury and grandeur. Because the vaults of the frigidarium had collapsed centuries before, McKim also must have drawn upon the well-known nineteenth-century reconstructions created by members of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he had studied.⁵² The Beaux-Arts–trained architects closely studied ancient architecture, especially that of Rome, and Renaissance forms, and as a result, ancient forms pervaded much of the Beaux-Arts architecture of the United States. The natatio of the baths also served as the model for the station’s concourse.⁵³ In the Baths of Caracalla’s scale, technological sophistication, and luxurious materials, McKim found a prototype for the vast waiting room of Penn Station both in terms of architectural grandeur and functionality.

FIGURE 8. Waiting room, Pennsylvania Station, Manhattan, historic postcard, 1911.

Source: Author’s collection.

The vast waiting room (300 × 100 feet) occupied two city blocks (Figure 8).⁵⁴ The coffered ceiling stood 150 feet tall. At the north and south walls, two colonnades of six Ionic columns framed a staircase. Jules Guerin’s painted topographical maps of the Pennsylvania Railroad network and other parts of the globe decorated the register above these columns. Just as the materials and sculptures in the Baths of Caracalla testified to the vast scope of the Roman Empire, the maps encompassed the reach of the Pennsylvania Railroad system, conveying the importance of the railroad. Natural light poured in from the eight lunette clerestory windows. These large, semicircular bath windows, often called thermal windows, were known from the Baths of Diocletian (dedicated in 306 CE), the best-preserved Roman baths. They were widely replicated in Palladio’s work (and then in eighteenth-century Britain), ensuring their transmission to later architects. Any human would feel dwarfed by the pristine travertine and clean lines of the space. Aesthetically, it was a grand entrance to New York City. While the sixty-foot-tall Corinthian columns appeared to support the ceiling, it was an illusion. Just as colored marble, stone, and stucco had adorned the brick-faced concrete core and vaults of the Baths of Caracalla, Pennsylvania Station was constructed of steel with a travertine veneer. The station, like the Baths of Caracalla, used the most advanced building technology of its day.

The design of the baths informed McKim’s approach to the waiting room. On a June day in 1901, Charles McKim visited the Baths of Caracalla with the architect Daniel Burnham; Charles Moore, the urban planner behind the McMillan Plan for Washington, DC; and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. The baths, although in a ruinous state, made a lasting impression upon McKim. Having the foresight to know that the baths would one day prove useful for his designs, McKim sketched workmen he had hired to walk and pose within the ruins so he could get sense of scale and movement.⁵⁵ The baths clearly also inspired Burnham, whose Union Station in Washington, DC, evokes the Baths of Caracalla, and Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station also uses Roman architecture.⁵⁶ These American stations also had British precursors, including the Doric Propylaea (1835–1839) of London’s Euston Station, Monkwearmouth (1848), and Newcastle’s more austere Central Station (1846–1855).⁵⁷

McKim must have understood that Roman baths faced the same problems that train stations did: How does one organize large numbers of people to move through space in an orderly way? Scholars have estimated that six to eight thousand bathers used the Baths of Caracalla each day;⁵⁸ the smooth circulation of people was therefore crucial to the building’s success. For McKim, the Baths of Caracalla were not merely an aesthetic model; they also provided a model for establishing an efficient flow of people that could be replicated.⁵⁹ Like the frigidarium in the Baths of Caracalla, the waiting room would be the heart of the station, pumping about half a million passengers in and out on a daily basis.⁶⁰

Pennsylvania Station had street frontages of granite Doric colonnades on all sides (Figure 9). The clocks located in the central pediments on each side were flanked by eagles and personifications of Day and Night by the sculptor Adolph Weinman. Clocks were essential, functional elements of train stations, reminding passengers to keep a spring in their step to catch their train. Day glanced down upon the traveler, holding a garland of sunflowers, while Night gazed down seriously, draping a cloak over her head.

But within a mere half-century, Pennsylvania Station would be no more, a casualty to technological progress. Although rail travel had been a major innovation of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century was the age of the car and plane. As these modes of travel became ever more affordable and widespread, the railroads declined. The Pennsylvania Railroad was soon in a precarious financial state, and demolishing the station in 1963 to make way for the new Madison Square Garden sports complex was the best financial outcome for the railroad company. The legendary architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable decried its destruction: “Penn Station is a tragic example. Nothing short of legal protection could have stopped its destruction, in spite of the fact that every qualified critic confirms its architectural merit and the beauty and even the solidity of its materials.”⁶¹ The demolition of Pennsylvania Station did spur the creation of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

FIGURE 9. Pennsylvania Station, Manhattan, between 1910 and 1920.

Source: The Library of Congress.

Today, the rabbit’s warren of subterranean tunnels that has replaced the elegant waiting room condemns commuters to regret almost any time spent in Penn Station. This unpleasant experience of leaving or arriving in New York City, however, might soon be altered—for the better. Across Eighth Avenue between Thirty-First and Thirty-Third Streets is the old James A. Farley Post Office (1910). Also a McKim, Mead & White building, its elegant Corinthian colonnade on its Eighth Avenue façade embodies the tradition of classically inspired civic buildings to be discussed in the next chapter. A quotation from Herodotus’s histories (8.98.1) on the façade, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” about the couriers of the Persian Empire, celebrates and emphasizes the importance of the Post Office’s role (Figure 10). When first erected next to Penn Station, the Farley Post Office created an elegant hub of Neo-Antique architecture embodying the values of the City Beautiful movement. Yet like the railroads, the post office experienced a steep decline during the twentieth century, and soon the Farley Post Office was yet another rundown public building.

FIGURE 10. Eighth Avenue façade, Farley Post Office, Manhattan, 2019.

Source: Author.

In 2017, after a quarter-century of discussion, construction commenced to transform part of the Farley Post Office into an extension of Pennsylvania Station. The project, which is estimated to cost $1.6 billion, is part of Governor Cuomo’s push to upgrade New York’s aging infrastructure. The plan for the train station, to be named for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who first proposed this idea in the early 1990s, is on its fifth iteration. While the plan will not solve critical issues facing the railroads, such as aging tracks and the need to increase train capacity, it would, as the New York Times notes, “provide many passengers with a more pleasant place to wait to board trains.”⁶² Penn Station might no longer be the most reviled train station along the Eastern Seaboard. Governor Cuomo boldly proclaimed, “This will be an entrance befitting New York.”⁶³ The classical forms and design that had transformed New York into a leading metropolis at the start of the twentieth century have remerged in the twenty-first century to provide New York with a grand gateway.