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Title: The Destruction of Penn Station by Peter Moore, Barbara Moore, Lorraine B. Diehl, Eric Peter Nash ISBN: 1-891024-05-1 Publisher: Distributed Art Publishers Pub. Date: 15 March, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: So that it doesn't happen again....
Comment: I am one of the generation of New Yorkers that have grown up with the ghost of the old Penn station - and its unfortunate replacement. We have been forever robbed of this stately thing, which was so much more than a building. Watching it's slow death in these haunting pictures makes me hope this is the last time we have used our imagination to destroy rather than build. (This is an especially painful irony in light of our recent tragedy.) Get this book, and look at it with your children. And may we never treat the human-made beauty around us with such contempt again.
Rating: 5
Summary: It was like watching someone die day by day
Comment: I remember as a kid in the mid-70s taking the train to NYC and having to endure the commuter's nightmare known as "modern" Penn Station.
In the late 80s, I learned what once was on the site of the current MSG/Penn Station monstrosity and became appalled that people could let a beautiful work of art be dismantled and replaced with a horrible building. In the early 1990s, I learned about the 1950s and 1960s and how Americans were obsessed with all things modern and new, rejecting anything with a hint of age or ornament.
Moore & Moore take a pictorial look on how the McKim, Mead and White's neoclassical masterpiece was dismantled over a multi-year period in the mid-1960s. While they really don't go into detail on why the old Penn Station was demolished, the spooky, B & W photos tell more than how an architectural gem was demolished. On a deeper level, the photos tell the tale of how an entire city was becoming irrelevant to suburban America and was sinking into massive decline (the years of municipal bankrupcy and burning neighborhoods in the South Bronx are only a few years away).
It was a very sad book that gets more depressing with each turn of the page, as more and more of the beauty of the old Penn Station gets stripped away. I guess that was the power of the photographs working on me.
Pair this book up with Robert Caro's _The Power Broker_ to get a good picture of New York in the early Baby Boom era.
Rating: 5
Summary: Must-buy for New York and/or McKim, Mead & White Buffs
Comment: This is an extraordinary, heartbreaking, must have book for anyone who loves New York and/or McKim, Mead & White's work.
Photographer Peter Moore and his wife Barbara moved into the Penn Station neighborhood in the early sixties. They used the building every day, whether they were passing through to the subway or catching a bite in the cavernous coffee shop.
With the railroad's permission, they documented its slow dismantling over the four years from 1963-1967. This book is the first appearance of that work. The black and white pictures are arranged chronologically, showing the faded but still magnificent station from its last days of active use through to its ghostly presence as a metal shell. The photography is beautiful and lyrical and sad beyond words, like a mournful love song to a love lost. The picures of the rubble-filled waiting room, its shape still intact but its side walls gone, are especially hard to take.
One note: this is not an exhaustive review of the building and its various spaces. It is a chrono picture of the concourse and waiting room through through their destruction. For more pics of the station in use, try "The Late, Great, Pennsylvania Station."
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Title: New York's Pennsylvania Stations by Hilary Ballon, Norman McGrath, Marilyn Taylor ISBN: 0393730786 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
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Title: Pennsylvania Station by Steven Parrissien ISBN: 0714834661 Publisher: Phaidon Press Inc. Pub. Date: 10 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station by Lorraine B. Diehl ISBN: 1568580606 Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship by Jon Meacham ISBN: 0375505008 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title:A Christmas Story (Two-Disc Special Edition) ASIN: B0000AYJUW Publisher: Warner Home Video Pub. Date: 07 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.99 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $20.24 |
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