« Bostonians | Main | bad Fridays »

Thu | December 22, 2005

Penn Station

All this transportation brouhaha makes me want to revive my Penn Station blog. I had a blog on blogspot called Penn Station for the sole purpose of venting my commuter thoughts. Then I stopped going into Kaps for a few months and the blog died. I started freelancing again about a month ago, but the time off made me realize there is no reason to have a blog just for Penn Station. One blog (this one) is enough.

What is this compulsion to write about the train? There is something about the train ride that makes it more of an event than a subway ride. On the subway you don't feel as if you've gone anywhere else. I mean, you've gone on the subway, but you are in New York. The train feels like a place in and of itself, or at least it is not part of any particular place. It goes through places, it isn't part of them. I think a lot of my compulsion to write about the train is an attempt to stabilize something, in my mind, that is neither here nor there, in reality.

And then Penn Station itself-- it's not beautiful like Grand Central (or like the original Penn Station, which was destroyed in the 60's) but there is something intellectually compelling about its form. With the number of entrances and connections, there's an interplay of the obvious and the not so obvious. Even when Penn Station is mobbed with Rangers fans, there are places that remain relatively unpopulated. These are spots few people know about, even though they're right there. And I like it that way.

My knowledge of Penn Station proved helpful on Tuesday, the first day of the strike. The morning was not a problem- there were more people exiting onto the street, who would usually have been dispersed to the A/C/E or 1/2/3 subway stops, but this merely slowed things up a bit. Going back in the evening, things were at a standstill on Seventh Avenue at 33rd Street. An unmoving mass of people blocked the main entrance. On one side they had formed themselves into a neat queue along the wooden police barricades, and I thought, people are so tractable. I stayed there for about twenty seconds and realized no one was getting anywhere, so went looking for other ways in-- after a few attempts, finding one at the mid-block entrance on 31st. There was almost no one on the train, because no one had figured out how to get down there. I enjoyed a quiet ride home.

A lot of Penn Station remains, to me, undiscovered and unexplored. Like the entire office space above Penn Plaza, and like the hockey stadium-- which I think I've been in, for a basketball game, but I have never seen it as a hockey rink. or field. whatever it's called. I suppose that part is properly called Madison Square Garden. But the fact that it's all right there-- together, and yet separate-- there is something interesting about that.

I looked for a map of the layout of Penn Station just now but couldn't find it.

« Previous | Posted by Lily in Écriture | on December 22, 2005 04:00 PM | Next »