I remember well walking through the old Penn Station everyday on the way to/from work at The Equitable across the street. The place never ceased to amaze me by it's majesty, scale and sense of place. I'm glad I left town before its demise. - I'm sorry, but this new attempt to recover what NYC allowed to slip away looks like a courtyard at a Marriott.

The new plans for a train station strike me as bleak and pointless, but ever so much more exciting than what we have now.

I'm also disturbed by plans to build a new City Opera house near Lincoln Center. It's not as if the West Side lacked performance venues. LC's Giuliani-mandated expansion to Time Warner with Jazz at Lincoln Center has given us the exceptionally flexible Rose Theatre and the Allen Room, with its spectacular views of Central Park -- both of which remain dark for weeks and weeks and months and months on end.

If the City Opera flees the State Theatre, the City Ballet will book its dark weeks with other dance companies, certainly at the expense of the Met Opera, City Center, and BAM.

It's all well and good to build a "Glimmerglass South," but how, exactly, would Paul Kellogg fill the 30-odd "off weeks"?

Like most NYC projects, lotsa talk, not a whole lotta build.

www.forgotten-ny.com

I'm ready to go to moy station - just build it already ... and stick some more places to sit into the design.

Umm, MH, the proposed station is a renovation of the Farley Post Office, a McKim, Mead and White classic that probably has more exterior columns than any building in the city.

BTW, what's the matter, Kojak, you don't want to say things like, "I'm going to Moy Station"?

Call me hopelessly stuck in the past, but this design really has nothing on the late, great Penn Station. That had grace, majesty and a feeling of brute strength in that massive, vaulted roof.

I think the building design is quite ugly. I am sorry, but most modern architecture built in New York City in the latter 21st century looks so plane. This Moynihan train station looks like a big box and the barrel vaults remind me of a barn. There have been technical and mechanical advances in modern society and also, quicker ways to build large structures. Is this all that the modern society can come up with. Why can't we have a few flying buttress, a few modern gargoyles, some modern Roman arches, and "modern" classical columns, not inside but exterior. Why do all building have to be square or have hard angels. Why is there no aesthetic beauty on the outside. What happened to the era in which city planners would build beautiful buildings and parks to enhance tourism. New York City is definately out of that running. Where is the creativity? Who is designing this stuff, engineers or architects? Where is the intuitive creativity?

Can we please call it something else other then Moynihan Station?

He was a good man and everything, but it just doesnt fit.