All Ye Who Enter - New York City's Pennsylvania Station and Port Authority Bus Terminal have seen better days, but at least both are clean and well maintained

National Review, June 5, 2000 by Richard Brookhiser

TWO of the main ground-transportation routes into New York have a stressed look, like rubber doormats that read WEI OMF.

Pennsylvania Station has a fundamental design problem. Because many of its tracks come from the west, they must be sunk below the bottom of the Hudson River. As a result the station platforms are unusually deep, reachable only by steep staircases or escalators. The disembarking travelers struggle up like trolls in the Hall of the Mountain King. Before my time, they were rewarded by an airy McKim, Mead, and White terminal, modeled on the Baths of Caracalla. Nothing of that now remains but a couple of stone eagles and a statue of a president of the Pen nsylvania Railroad, clasping a bronze fedora. The latest incarnation of Madison Square Garden squats on the site, with the terminal below it. Rail passengers must come and go in a mean underground arcade, so that thuggish millionaires may palm the ball and travel with impunity.

The Port Authority Bus Terminal was for many years even worse. The disparity reflected the difference in class between train and bus riders. Trains are the prisons of commuters, and the obsession of hobbyists. Buses are the transportation of the poor. As is so often the case in compassionate societies, the poor were insulted by being forced to endure the antics of the very poor. I once saw a decades-old documentary on drag queens. The closing shot showed the winner of a drag beauty contest, waiting at the Port Authority for his bus home. He sat on his suitcase, holding his prize, a cheap tinsel crown. The filmmakers wanted us to think, "How tawdry, how touching." What any New Yorker of the '80s or early '90s thought was, "No bums! No mad whores! The Port Authority looks great!" Indeed, it had fallen on hard times. Bum families lived in its rest rooms. Demented folk, stinking and raving, padded about with bare swollen feet. Bad enough that you were coming from Poughkeepsie. How much worse that you had to arrive at a place like this.

In Giuliani Time, both places took a turn for the better. Penn Station has built a waiting area for Metroliner ticketholders. The look of it- futurism of the past-makes you think of the bridge of the starship Enterprise. The Port Authority was given a makeover too. The ugliness of the building makes beauty impossible, but at least it is now clean and trim. More important, the laws are enforced. For seats, there are high, narrow, spring-mounted slats that you must fold down for a perch and that pop up as soon as you rise. Only a Giacometti figure would feel comfortable in them, but they make overnight stays impossible.

The two terminals have one thing in common: classical music. After you ride into the Port Authority's garage, where the buses nuzzle each other like blind cave creatures and pigeons skim through the exhaust like bats, once you emerge into the relative cleanliness of the terminal, you are greeted by violins. In Penn Station, as you leave rush-hour madness on Seventh Avenue to clatter downstairs on staccato heels, bound for New Jersey, there to herald you are piccolo trumpets. It's lively and bright; even when you expect it, it comes as a surprise; it's like having sparkling water poured into your ears. The selections range from Vivaldi to Haydn, all instrumental, very little dark or chromatic, a great stretch of white, C-major music. Brahms would be too insistent, Josquin too ethereal. I experienced in myself a similar constriction of range when I was undergoing chemotherapy. Anything that had voices or a trace of ap pas siona to made me recoil, as from forced intimacy. In the midst of my business I don't want to think, pray, or brood; I want my spirit to tap its toe.

The music has another purpose besides refreshment. It is just loud enough to discourage sleeping, and it is remote enough from the pop sensibility to discomfit loiterers. From time to time science announces that dolphins prefer Mozart to rock. Urban youths prefer hip-hop to Gluck. Thirty years after Bill Buckley defended Johann Sebastian Bach against some young man who had called him an "old dead punk," we have found a use for the bewigged Lutheran: crowd control.

So much for the side doors. New York's front door is Grand Central Terminal. This is a railroad station so commodious and gradual that you may walk from your platform to the street without once encountering a step. At the navel of the main hall is a tiny gold clock, like a giant's toy; on the ceiling are constellations, attended by zodiacal figures. Beyond the great hall is a lesser one, which would be a handsome terminal for any city the size of Cleveland. The reduction of scale is deliberate, like bringing a diver up slowly to avoid the bends. Outside, on 42nd Street, rushing New Yorkers use intra-urban ground transport, the abused foot. Behind you floats Mercury, god of commerce and thieves; over your left shoulder is the Chrysler Building, icon of modernity. "Every new scene," wrote Alexander Hamilton, "which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort." The little Caribbean got that right. Welcome-and get to work.