Penn Station

New York City's Pennsylvania Station opened on this date in 1910. Better known as Penn Station, the 1910 version bore absolutely no resemblance to the structure as we know it today. It was a grand example of the Beaux-Arts style, built of pink granite, with stately columns and a skylit interior modeled after a Roman bath. The main waiting room alone was a block and a half long, with 150-foot ceilings. Its tunnels, which ran under the Hudson River, were engineering marvels.

By the late 1950s, though, air travel had gotten cheaper, and the new, smooth, interstate highways tempted people to take automobile trips rather than boarding a train. The rail company couldn't afford to keep its showplace clean, and plans were made to replace Penn Station — at least the above-ground portion of it — with a multi-use entertainment venue, to be called Madison Square Garden.

The stately Beaux-Arts building was leveled in 1963, and replaced with a subterranean, air-conditioned warren lit by cold, fluorescent bulbs. New Yorkers were outraged at the demolition. One New York Times editorial from 1963 read, "We will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed." That outrage helped jump-start the architectural preservation movement in the United States. The New York Landmarks Law was passed two years later, just in time to save Grand Central Terminal, Radio City Music Hall, and thousands other historical landmarks from a similar fate.

Train travel through Penn Station has bounced back; today, it's the busiest train station in the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, a writer for the BBC recently called the modern Penn Station an "architectural crime scene," and added, "Outside of the U.S. penitentiary system, it is hard to think of a more joyless building." Vincent Scully, a professor of architecture at Yale, commented, "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat."

- The Writer's Almanac