None of the roughly 640,000 commuters who scuttle—or, at rush hour, shuffle—through Penn Station every day can doubt that it needs, um, improvements…. But sorting through the various, plans, counterplans, and multibillion-dollar options has become as disorienting as navigating the station itself. Here, then, is the reasonably well-informed New Yorker’s guide to what Penn Station actually is, and how it might one day be rescued from Dantesque degradation. …
A design by the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill envisions covering the courtyard of the Farley building with a set of glass barrel vaults supported on existing trusses. Passengers coming off Eighth Avenue would walk down a gentle ramp and into a hall roughly the size of Grand Central Terminal’s main concourse—a spacious, daylit monument to rail travel.