The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, beli

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2021-07-07 19:30:08

The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, believe it or not, Robert Caro is to blame.

Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, is the author of “The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community.” The research in article was supported by a fellowship from NYU’s Marron Institute for Urban Management.

At the northeastern corner of the underground maze that doubles as the Western Hemisphere’s most heavily trafficked transit hub, two frantic streams of pedestrians converge. Commuters—more than 8,000 of them heading in and out, every hour, during the morning rush—enter New York’s Pennsylvania Station from the blocks surrounding Macy’s department store and go down a crowded set of escalators off 34th Street. After arriving at the basement level, they merge with the hordes that exit New York’s subway, roughly 27 million passengers entering and leaving this one station each year. Together, the two torrents then enter the “barrel corridor,” a cavelike hallway lined with drug stores, coffee shops and rundown delis hocking “big boys,” the canisters of cheap beer popular with construction workers heading home to Long Island.

In May 2017, near the end of an ordinary Wednesday morning rush hour, a sewer pipe set above the barrel corridor burst open. Within minutes, streams of excrement poured through the station’s tiled ceiling. Sludge spread from a shabby McDonald’s at one end of the corridor to the Long Island Railroad ticket windows farther down. Armed with mops and buckets, janitors placed rolling dumpsters beneath the heaviest streams, but they couldn’t contain the flood. Unwitting commuters, their eyes cast at the downpour, traipsed through the mess, tracking it in all directions. A stench permeated the whole complex.