Hosannas greeted the recent unveiling of brand new Moynihan Train Hall, across the street from Penn Station in Manhattan. But who knows or cares about the mundane upgrade that's occurring across the river at Newark Penn Station?
We do.
It was the legendary architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White that designed both Penn Stations — the one in Newark and the original in New York. Together, they define stylistic whiplash. The New York station, opened in 1910, embodied empire. It was stately and monumental and none-too-subtly referenced the Roman baths of Caracalla. We have all cried over its passing, and rightly so, although most of us only ever experienced it through the same black and white photos.
Then came Newark Penn Station in 1935. The architects threw out their neoclassical playbook and went modern. The swagger of its Art Deco details ripple throughout, from jazzy sign fonts to stainless steel entrances with ornate metalwork, to 800-pound chandeliers ringed with the signs of the Zodiac — confident flourishes that convey motion and a very American sense of style.
The main waiting hall is not only 51 feet high, it holds a display that is a transpo nerd’s delight: carved stone medallions depicting the history of American travel. It starts with Native Americans in a canoe, moves through Clipper ship and stagecoach, and ends with trains, planes, and automobiles. Above that is a cerulean blue ceiling that an Amtrak blog describes this way: “Down its length runs a wide band of gilded wavy lines that provide the sense of movement that is so essential to Art Deco design.”
The $190 million spruce-up of these elements, along with more mundane concerns such as bathrooms and lighting, has begun. David Abeles, NJ Transit’s general superintendent of rail stations, recently walked the station with WNYC/Gothamist and pointed out fixes in progress, beginning with the freshly cleaned and shined terrazzo floors. “If the floors shine, people are impressed,” he said.
A host of other improvements are scheduled for the next five years: upgrades to the heating, air-conditioning, and ventilation systems, new tiling, better drainage on the bus lanes, and a deep-cleaning of the station’s limestone exterior. There’s even a plan to improve the legibility of the station’s sparse signage.
Newark Penn Station is NJ Transit’s largest of its 153 passenger facilities and the eighth largest train station in North America. “It’s our most important station and quite literally a crossroads,” Abeles said. It hosts traffic from Amtrak, the PATH Train, and the agency’s commuter rails. Before Covid, 90,000 people coursed through Newark Penn Station on weekdays — a number that is still down by 80 percent.
After dispensing those glum statistics, Abeles quickly returned to talking about aesthetics.
“Newark Penn Station, it flies under the radar but it is spectacular in its own right,” he said, while standing near the waiting room’s seating area, which was taped off in preparation for repairs to its long, curved, wooden benches. “And if you look on the outside, there's giant rose granite arches, beautifully carved, built with the grandeur that the Pennsylvania Railroad carried in the 1930s.”
The Pennsylvania Railroad had acquired 600 rival lines by the time it had finished building Newark Penn Station in 1935, making it the largest corporation in the world. This helps explain why, confusingly, it named both of its major rail stops in Newark and New York "Penn Station." Because it could.
“If it was a station on the Pennsylvania Railroad in a major city, it was called ‘Penn Station,’” Abeles explained. But by the 1970s, the railroad had gone belly up, its fortunes dimmed by the aforementioned planes and automobiles. Which is why I suggested that NJ Transit rename the place after a New Jersey native, like Bruce Springsteen or Queen Latifah. Or maybe passengers would like to hear this announcement while traveling eastbound on the Gladstone Line: “Ladies and gentlemen, the train is now arriving in Newark ‘The Situation’ Station.”
Yes? No? Barf?
“I can certainly mention it to my bosses,” Abeles said. “We'll see where that goes.”
