The New York City council voted overwhelmingly this week to renew the lease of Madison Square Garden only for 10 more years – essentially serving an eviction notice to the hulking stadium in midtown Manhattan. The decision was cheered by architectural and civic organizations, who have been pressing for decades to redevelop Pennsylvania station, the neglected railway terminus underneath the stadium. Penn station is by far the busiest railway station in North America, and Madison Square Garden has been one of the principal roadblocks to redeveloping it.
The eviction notice for Madison Square Garden offers the best opportunity in decades to revive Penn station. Earlier this year the Municipal Art Society presented a quartet of new design proposals from architects such as Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who masterminded the reconstruction of Lincoln Center, and ShoP Architects, designers of the Barclays center stadium in Brooklyn. All the proposed designs eliminate the underground maze of today's Penn station, and bring passengers back up into the city.
While the US has long suffered from some of the worst infrastructure in the western world, other cities have built some hideous stations too.
Old Penn station
The original Penn station, which opened in 1910, was a beaux-arts masterpiece. Designed by McKim, Mead & White, the most prominent architectural firm of the era – responsible also for the Morgan library and the Brooklyn museum – the station served as a breathtaking arrival point for visitors to New York. The station's waiting room, modeled on St Peter's Basilica in Rome, was the largest indoor space in New York at the time.
New Penn station
The current, calamitous Penn station opened in 1968 and is entirely underground. "Through it one entered the city like a god," Vincent Scully said of the old station. "Now one scuttles in like a rat." The current design "features" grimy, fluorescent-lit narrow hallways, now packed to capacity as more than 300,000 passengers trample through the terminus every day. The horror of the new Penn station did have one positive effect, however: it contributed to grassroots opposition to Robert Moses, the all-powerful "master builder" of New York. While he got his way with Penn station, his subsequent plans for an expressway cutting through lower Manhattan were thwarted.
Not unlike Penn, Euston in central London is a gritty 1960s monstrosity that replaced an innovative earlier structure. The original Euston featured a wrought-iron roof and allowed natural light onto the platforms. The low, flat building constructed afterwards has none of the earlier station's charm. The current trainshed is a dank, underlit bunker, unconvincingly tarted up with some irregularly watered potted plants.
Birmingham New Street
The second-largest city in Britain is saddled with what must be the country's worst railway station. A low-slung concrete slab with a shopping mall and a parking lot plopped on top of it, New Street features half a dozen entrances that never seem to get you to the right location. Despite the name, New Street station is not on New Street – you have to walk through a dingy shopping center to get there.
Update: As commenters (and Network Rail) point out, New Street is in the throes of a massive redevelopment, due to be completed in 2015. Don't expect New York city planners to move so rapidly, though.
Brussels central station
The capital of the European Union doesn't exactly put its best foot forward for railway passengers. The Brussels train station, sited entirely underground, recalls Penn in all the worst ways. Cold, filthy, appallingly lit, and stinking of urine, the station is located underneath some of the city's main streets, and therefore has no room to expand capacity as more and more passengers crowd onto its overtaxed platforms.
Update: Okay, hands up, Central has recently had a bit of a spruce-up and public urination in Brussels may now be confined to that statue of the pissing boy, but the covered-up platforms of Brussels Central are as low-ceilinged as ever.
One of the largest stations in Europe and a hub for both international and local rail, Rome's railway terminus is not exactly on the level of the Coliseum or the Forum. Set in a grotty neighborhood east of the Tiber, the late 1940s structure features a long, ominous cantilevered concrete roof that has led Romans to nickname the station il dinosauro, "the dinosaur." Not only is it desperately crowded, but you have to dive past rows of buses to get to the front entrance. And perpetual reconstruction, usually featuring torn-up streets cordoned off with corrugated fencing, never seems to make things easier.
Budapest Deli railway terminal
The Hungarian capital has some sublime examples of civic architecture, including a stunning 19th century railway station designed by the Eiffel company. But much of today's train traffic now comes through this communist-era structure on the other side of town, a poorly maintained mishmash of stained concrete and blacked-out windows.