‘I’m not focused on names at all’: Rumors of Trump Station replacing Penn Station in New York batted aside

When Manhattan’s original Pennsylvania Station was demolished in 1963, it marked the undignified end to one of America’s great public works, a monolithic Beaux Arts train terminal with Roman-style columns and a spacious central waiting area that at the time was the largest indoor space in the city. In its place rose Madison Square Garden — home of NBA’s New York Knicks and NHL’s New York Rangers — while train commuters were forced underground into gloomy, claustrophobic, low-ceilinged corridors by the decidedly more utilitarian redesign completed in 1968. “Through Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god,” the architectural historian Vincent Scully famously lamented. “One scuttles in now like a rat.” But a dramatic new vision for the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere calls for a return to the old grandeur of the station, which was originally opened in 1910 and currently serves Amtrak, the national rail carrier that owns the terminal, as well as commuter rail lines to the surrounding suburbs and connections to the city’s vast subway system. Renderings released Monday by Amtrak and Penn Transformation Partners, the design and development consortium picked for the project, feature a rectangular, stone facade lined with imposing columns along a grand entry way. Inside, commuters are to be greeted by a sunlight-drenched grand concourse with soaring ceilings more than 50 feet high in places. It includes such touches as bronze finishings and other ornamental details, like a bas relief of the city’s famous skyline and a large, classic station clock, also made of bronze. An interior wall near a entryway bears the seal of President Donald Trump, who had Amtrak assume control of the project last year after decades of bureaucratic red tape and political infighting among transit agencies and the competing interests of other powerful players, including James Dolan, the billionaire owner of MSG, the Knicks and the Rangers, who has staunchly opposed mo