In the early 1990s, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed turning part of Manhattan’s James A. Farley Post Office—a McKim, Mead & White building just west of Madison Square Garden—into a new Pennsylvania Station, partially making up for the destruction of the same firm’s landmark station in 1963.?
More than 20 years later, part of the plan is moving forward…
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is designing the new space, which will feature a huge skylight over what had been the Farley’s mail-sorting facility. “Imagine a space about as big as Grand Central, lit from above,” explains Roger Duffy, the SOM partner in charge of the project. By reusing the building’s existing steel trusses, his design “creates a dialogue between the history of the building and the new construction,” he says.