Pennsylvania Station also known as New York Penn Station or simply Penn Station is the main intercity railroad station in New York City and the busiest transportation facility in the Western Hemisphere , serving more than , passengers per weekday as of [update].
Farley Building , with additional exits to nearby streets, in Midtown Manhattan. Connections are available within the complex to the New York City Subway and buses. Penn Station is named for the Pennsylvania Railroad PRR , its builder and original owner, and shares its name with several stations in other cities.
The original Pennsylvania Station was an ornate station building designed by McKim, Mead, and White and considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style. Completed in , it enabled direct rail access to New York City from the south for the first time. Its head house and train shed were torn down in at a time of low train ridership, with the rail infrastructure reconstituted as the smaller underground station that survives today. The New York Times editorial board described the demolition of the original station as a "monumental act of vandalism", [ 7 ] and its destruction galvanized the modern historic preservation movement.
Manhattan-bound passengers boarded ferries to cross the Hudson River for the final stretch of their journey. In any event, none of the proposals advanced during this time were considered feasible. An early proposal for a bridge was considered but rejected. During half a century of operation by the Pennsylvania Railroad โ , scores of intercity passenger trains arrived and departed daily to Chicago and St. Louis on "Pennsy" rails and beyond on connecting railroads to Miami and the west. A side effect of the tunneling project was to open the city up to the suburbs, and within 10 years of opening, two-thirds of the daily passengers coming through Penn Station were commuters.
The station put the Pennsylvania Railroad at comparative advantage to its competitors offering direct service from Manhattan to the west and south. By , at its peak, more than million passengers a year traveled through Penn Station. By the late s, intercity rail passenger volumes had declined dramatically with the coming of the Jet Age and the Interstate Highway System. The station's exterior had become somewhat grimy, and due to its vast scale, the station was expensive to maintain.
