American Experience On Penn Station

Trigger

Just watched American Experience on Penn Station in New York city. My remarks here will be preliminary as I did not have time for further research on this topic. This is a great documentary!

Own Experience

One of my first trips to my new and first employer in the U.S. around 1995 was from J. F. Kennedy Airport to Penn Station in New York city. I was not too impressed with this underground rail station with Madison Square Garden on top of it. The post office next to it looked more impressive.

Well, this documentary corrected my views thoroughly.

Quick Notes

CEOs of the Pennsylvania Railroad  (PPR, the largest railroad company in the U.S. for decades and at one time the largest publicly traded company in the world) company were dying on their job so did Alexander J. Cassatt.

It was a colossal private project financed by private money without government subsidies. “[T]he total project cost to the Pennsylvania Railroad for the station and associated tunnels was $114 million” (Wikipedia).

Lot’s of black sandhogs workers were hired to drill the tunnel under the Hudson River. Thus, it was possible to hire black Americans to work on dangerous jobs to work closely together with white workers in tight spaces in the early 20th century preceding Civil Rights and all that. This documentary shows a lot of photographies of black and white workers working together.

The great Baths of Caracalla in Rome was a model for Penn station.

When on site accidents and rising death toll during construction became a public concern, journalists were allowed to tour the tunnels as a pioneering public relations approach.  PPR hired a pioneer of public relations, i.e. Ivy Lee. “[H]e was considered to be the first public relations person placed in an executive-level position [at PPR]. In fact, his archives reveal that he drafted one of the first job descriptions of a VP-level corporate public relations position.” (Wikipedia).

Cassatt was inspired and studied the Gare d'Orsay train station in Paris to learn about an underground train station and how electric powered locomotives pulled the trains into this station.

The demolition of Penn Station in 1963 was the tipping point for building preservation and historic landmarks in the U.S. Grand Central Station survived because of it.