Grand Penn proposal for rebuilding Penn Station. (Grand Penn Community Alliance)

Big news: President Trump has agreed to take over the job of building a new, classically-inspired Pennsyvlania Station. He has given the boot to the inept Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and has put Amtrak – which owns the facility – in charge of rebuilding it, with Madison Square Garden to be demolished and rebuilt across Seventh Avenue.

The new Penn Station would be called Grand Penn. It derives from a plan issued several months ago by what has been known as the Grand Penn Community Alliance. This plan would take the place of Rebuild Penn Station, a plan to largely reconsruct the demolished 1910 Pennsylvania Station proposed by architect Richard Cameron and the Beaux Arts Atelier, who had proposed a more thoroughgoing copy of the original station. Both it and the latest plan are supported by the National Civic Art Society and its president, Justin Shubow. The latest proposal features a public park next to the station along the lines of Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library – at the very dear expense of the huge waiting room from the original station. The original station was demolished in 1963.

I have had a difficult time deciding whether the loss of the waiting room is worth the addition of the park. If you believe the project is much more likely to be completed under the supervision of Trump, as I do, then I think the balance tips to the latest proposal. Except for some horrendous glassy modernist walls above the classical colonnade along Seventh Avenue, and above the passage from the rail hall to the park feature, the latest proposal’s architecture is reassuringly classical. But the loss of the waiting room – such a small phrase for such a grand salon! – is a serious omission, one that negates the imagery made famous by the post-demolition remark of historian Vincent Scully: “One once entered the city like a god, one now scuttles in like a rat.”

I like the latest proposal but have not yet given up on rebuilding the original station.

Others will have a more useful assessment of the proposal’s prospects given the current political and bureaucratic morass. Tom Klingenstein, chairman of the Claremont Institute, has an interesting essay in the NYT summing up the proposal more comprehensively (by far) than this blog post.

Can any project led by Trump be considered rational or doable? Remember that Trump took over the Wollman ice skating rink in Central Park after others had tried and rebuilt it on time and under budget long before he ran for his first term as president. And now, defying expectations, he has won a second term. I am not the first to suppose that if anyone can rebuild Penn Station, it is Trump who can do it.