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This is a tribute to stupidity, not just simple stupidity like forgetting your keys or locking yourself out of the house, but stupidity on a monumental scale that only New Yorkers can appreciate. I'm talking about New York's late, great Penn Station. Demolished in 1963 to make room for Madison Square Garden, Penn Station was a railroad palace of colossal proportions, it occupied 2 full city blocks taking up 8 acres of prime New York real estate. The station completed in 1910 was design by the firm McKim, Mead & White. In her 2007 book, Conquering Gotham: a Gilded Age Epic – The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels, historian Jill Jonnes called the original edifice a “great Doric temple to transportation"! Each grand street level entrance had massive sculptures centered with a clock. The sculptures, "Day & Night" were the work of Adolph Weinman, a German immigrant who studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Somehow in the greater scheme of things, some powerful New Yorkers, among them Robert Moses lost touch with what Penn Station really was to New York City. As it turned out, it was the soul of the city. In 1963 despite the protests of some enlightened New Yorkers, Penn Station was razed and many of the Weinman sculptures ended up uncerimoniously in a dump in New Jersey. While the underground platforms of Penn Station still exist today, the above ground station is only a memory prompting the renowned Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully to write comparing the new and the old Penn Station... “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” the demolition of Penn Station did serve a purpose in that it sparked a preservation movement in America that has helped to save many of our historic buildings from destruction.

Description
This is a tribute to stupidity, not just simple stupidity like forgetting your keys or locking yourself out of the house, but stupidity on a monumental scale that only New Yorkers can appreciate. I'm talking about New York's late, great Penn Station. Demolished in 1963 to make room for Madison Square Garden, Penn Station was a railroad palace of colossal proportions, it occupied 2 full city blocks taking up 8 acres of prime New York real estate. The station completed in 1910 was design by the firm McKim, Mead & White. In her 2007 book, Conquering Gotham: a Gilded Age Epic – The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels, historian Jill Jonnes called the original edifice a “great Doric temple to transportation"! Each grand street level entrance had massive sculptures centered with a clock. The sculptures, "Day & Night" were the work of Adolph Weinman, a German immigrant who studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Somehow in the greater scheme of things, some powerful New Yorkers, among them Robert Moses lost touch with what Penn Station really was to New York City. As it turned out, it was the soul of the city. In 1963 despite the protests of some enlightened New Yorkers, Penn Station was razed and many of the Weinman sculptures ended up uncerimoniously in a dump in New Jersey. While the underground platforms of Penn Station still exist today, the above ground station is only a memory prompting the renowned Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully to write comparing the new and the old Penn Station... “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” the demolition of Penn Station did serve a purpose in that it sparked a preservation movement in America that has helped to save many of our historic buildings from destruction.