The station plan ([Fig. 12.6]) shows how creatively McKim imitated Roman architecture. The succession of portico, vestibule, arcade, vestibule, staircase, which leads to what before remodelling of 1958 was the climax in the great central concourse, is noble architectural language, beautiful ordering of space, which Hadrian would have understood, and so is the balance in the façade, the alternating rhythms throughout the building of open and closed, big and little, wide and narrow. In the arcade, the repeated rhythms (now spoiled by advertising) emphasize the traditional, and the movement which is the essence of transportation. The great central hall, once a pool of open space, is even larger (340 × 210 feet, and 100 feet high) than the one that inspired it in the Baths; it is longer than the nave of St. Peter’s. In it McKim contrived to preserve simplicity, dignity, and monumentality in spite of mechanical distractions, as when he used the protruding tops of ventilator shafts as pedestals for lamp-standards. The other refinements, too, are in the Roman manner and material. The rich golden stone facing of the great room is travertine imported from Tivoli, here used for the first time in America (and now badly in need of cleaning). The structural steel and glass in the concourse leading to the trains may have been inspired by the girders in the Baths of Caracalla. The statistics that record 1140 carloads of pink granite brought from New England to build the half-mile of exterior walls are in the Roman tradition, and so is the vast extent of the eight-acre structure, and the six years it took to build. The efficiency is Roman, too: access on all four sides, carriage drives twice as wide as the normal New York street of 1910—when the building was opened—a traffic-flow plan that separated incoming and outgoing passengers.
Pennsylvania Station belongs to a vanished era, an era of princely magnificence, of willingness to spend on purely aesthetic pleasure. The young architectural fellows of McKim’s Academy in Rome are impatient with what it stands for, but perhaps they are letting their understandable and proper scorn of soulless copying—of which there is far too much in American monumental architecture—stand in the way of their appreciation of a building which has worn well, and earned accolades—especially by contrast with recent tawdry and misguided additions in plastic—from such emancipated critics, friendly to modern trends in architecture, as Talbot Hamlin and Lewis Mumford. In a day of what a less temperate critic than these has called “the monstrous repetition of cellular facades cloaked with vitreous indifference” by “sedulous apes to the latest expressions of technological baboonery,” it may be salutary to look with understanding at how successful a modern architect of genius can be with a Roman model.
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Roman baths needed oceans of water. It was supplied by another triumph of Roman engineering, the system of aqueducts. The eleventh and last of the ancient aqueducts was built by the Emperor Alexander Severus in A.D. 226; the earliest, the Aqua Appia, dates back to the same builder and the same year—312 B.C.—as the regina viarum. The network ([Fig. 12.8]) supplied Rome with over 250,000,000 gallons of water every twenty-four hours. When New York was thrice the size of Severan Rome, its aqueducts supplied only 425,000,000 gallons daily.
Fig. 12.6 New York, Pennsylvania Station, McKim plan.
(A. H. Granger, Charles Follen McKim, p. 77)
Fig. 12.7 New York, Pennsylvania Station, waiting room, before “modernization.”
(Granger, op. cit., fac. p. 82)