Penn Station Project (Beer Coolers)

The above picture represents one of my Friday afternoon commuting rituals.  If I'm not able to do happy hour with some of my colleagues, I brown bag a tallboy can of beer on the train ride home.  This is technically against the rules of New Jersey Transit, but only the written rules.  It is not in violation of the unwritten rules.  As long as I keep it hidden, don't litter or spill, and not bother anyone else, the conductors will turn a blind eye.

Vendors in Penn Station are well aware of this.  When you walk down the main concourse, you'll notice various pizzerias and sub sandwich shops, all of which have massive plexiglass, open-topped coolers full of ice and tallboy beer cans.  They also have beer taps, and I have seen some people walk away with massive Big Gulp sized containers, sipping their beer through a straw, which I refuse to do. This practice seems much more common among the riders on the Long Island Railroad, make of that what you will.

Not all of these places in the concourse are created equal.  Many offer only Yuengling as the sole alternative to Bud Light.  A couple of places, however, regularly have craft beer of top quality available.  I have no idea what the names of these places are, I just know them by sight and by their location on the concourse.  For a short glorious time one of the places was stocked with Bell's beer, a label I consumed with much gusto when I lived in Michigan, and which isn't easy to find in these parts.  For a couple of glorious Fridays I ended the working week sipping on a smooth Bell's brown ale, remembering the past and drifting into a zone of mental relaxation.

That's why the conductors will never bust me and the other tired people nursing beers on the train.  We tend not to be boisterous (those are the folks getting on the train wrecked after happy hour), but introspective.  This also happens to be why I never stick around to take the trains that leave around 7 on a Friday, since they are full of drunk yahoos.  I like stepping off the train, feeling refreshed and I little buzzed, ready to greet my wife and kids and enjoy a relaxing weekend together.  I hear that a removal of the coolers is in the works.  Why can't they just let us worn out commuters enjoy this simple privilege?

Penn Station Project (The Hilton Passageway)

There are many grimy, dirty places in Penn Station, but there is none more obscure in its dirt and grime than the Hilton Passageway. 

In a station full of bustle and crowds, it is often almost completely, eerily empty.  I discovered it only after about six months of commuting.  I take New Jersey Transit to Penn, but when I get out I have to get to the 123 subway train, which is on the other side of the station, about two short New York blocks.  The obvious way is to walk down the main concourse, flanked by cheap eateries and curious retail establishments, from the shoeshine place that sells umbrellas on rainy days to the subterranean Kmart.  (More on the main concourse in a later installment of the Penn Station Project.)

One day I figured out that there was a shortcut through a dirty, almost deserted hallway with exposed pipe.  It’s usually full of wheeled carts carrying piles of trash bags, which had me initially assuming that it was a service entrance for the custodial staff.  I soon discovered that it was a perfectly legitimate path to cross the station, but one so hidden and dirty that people easily overlook it.  Some of the wiser homeless people in the station seem to have discovered this.

I love this space for many reasons, not least of which is that there are multiple signs alerting passers by that they are in the “Hilton Passageway.”  Did Hilton Hotels actually pay for this?  Is it an homage to Conrad Hilton?  Does it have nothing whatsoever to do with him?  I haven’t the slightest idea.  I love it too because of its quiet in a place where the crowds are maddening. It is my morning contemplation chamber, that little space between the train and the subway where I can think a little about the day stretched out before me.  At the end of the day its quiet squalor is a sign that I am about to go home and be delivered from the working world.

It is not a space for the faint of heart, though.  The pipes are exposed, and giant formations of lint and dirt sometimes sway in the wake of the blown in air that feels drained of oxygen and tastes like iron filings.  I feel terrible for the people who work on this level of the station, as they are deprived of oxygen and sunlight, and would not be surprised if decades of prolonged exposure didn’t turn them into Morlocks.  It is the ultimate rebuke to the decision to tear down the original Penn’s marbled glory.  Even though I have learned to love it, it’s really more a case of Stockholm Syndrome than anything else.

Penn Station Project (Tracks Bar and Grill)

For my first entry in my Penn Station Project, I thought I would highlight one of the few places in Penn Station that are bright beacons in an otherwise dark and awful place.

During my first few months of commuting through Penn Station I would walk from the New Jersey Transit terminal to the 123 subway line via the main hall past all of the stores and restaurants.  I soon discovered an alternate route through an exceptionally dingy, empty corridor that dead ends at a side entrance to the subway line.  Right at that dead end sits one of the great curiosities of New York and perhaps the world, Tracks Bar and Grill.

Although it is embedded in the least attractive corner of Penn Station, the outside is all shiny diner chrome and neon beer signs.  In the dank corridor one is greeted by the sign I've posted a picture of below:

In this cave of despair there is indeed a raw bar, good food, and some very tasty pints of beer.  ("Gold Medal Guinness" another sign exclaims, and I have no reason to doubt it.)For awhile I avoided it, thinking there was no way that Penn Station could possibly contain such a safe harbor.  Then one Friday I was meeting my spouse after work, who was coming in from Jersey.  I got to the station too soon and found myself with some time to kill.  I figured what the hell, and went into the bar.  I was pleasantly surprised.

Like all good bars do, it exudes warmth, the kind of human warmth that pushes drunks to pay extra to get loaded at a bar, rather than more cheaply at home.  The barkeeps are almost invariably middle-aged Irishwomen, quick on their feet and friendly.  Since I only go to Tracks every once in a blue moon I am pretty anonymous, but the bartenders seem to know practically everyone else on a first name basis.  While Tracks is always crowded, the bar is incredibly long (105 feet, supposedly), and I have never failed to secure a seat at the rail.  Almost no one sits at the small cluster of tables by the door.  People aren't there for the much-lauded raw bar, any food consumed is in the interests of soaking up alcohol.

Tracks is full of a kind of special energy one only feels in the presence of people getting off of work and taking a slight detour on their way home.  Guys in paint-stained Carharts lugging lunch boxes rub shoulders with men in navy suits and loosened ties. The talk is fast and lively, the smiles plenty, and vibes are good.  Most of Penn Station is a kind of dehumanizing nightmare, the kind of place you are just hoping to rush through on the way to someplace else.  Tracks actually invites you to linger, and in the low light amid the joy of a Friday happy hour with some very high quality Guinness in your belly, it's easy to forget that you are in the bowels of Penn Station.  This last Friday I sipped a wonderfully creamy pint of Guinness in that glorious moment that is as far away from work on Monday as you're gonna get.  Tracks is not the best bar in the world, but it is pretty damn high on the list when it comes to the best place to have a pint with strangers on a Friday afternoon.  As I ambled over to my train that warmth stayed with me, and I could look out of my train window at the desolate marshes between the tunnel and Newark with a smile of bemused contentment.

Introducing the Penn Station Project

Editor's Note: I am currently reading the book Looking For America On The New Jersey Turnpike by Angus Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland and am blown away at how they are able to derive so much meaning from such a mundanely inhumane institution.  This morning while reading the book on the train I had an "a ha!" moment: shouldn't Penn Station get similar treatment?  I then remembered that I have not the time, talent, or resources to write a similar book about America's busiest train station.  I then remembered that I at least have this humble blog.  I plan on making the Penn Station Project a running series.  Today is the first chapter.

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Penn Station might be the most unloveable place of its importance in the world, on par with Heathrow and LAX, but worse because it isn't even allowed to be its own space.  It is first and foremost the basement of Madison Square Garden, an afterthought beneath The World's Greatest Arena.

It is even more unloveable for being a poor replacement for what had been one of the most impressive train stations ever constructed.  The original was completed in 1910, a Beaux Arts beauty made of pink marble and meant to symbolize permanence.  In perhaps the greatest crime against New York's built environment ever perpetuated, Penn Station was torn down in the mid-1960s, its marble and famed eagles dumped into a swamp in New Jersey.  In less than sixty years a great monument to the ascendance of rail travel had been obliterated, a sign of its obsolescence in the age of the automobile.

The new Penn Station would be part of a multipurpose space, a concept so beloved by architects and urban planners of the day.  On top would be Madison Square Garden and a tall office building, jammed beneath, like an unwanted child, would be Penn Station.  Never mind that 650,000 people pass through it everyday, more than the number of passengers at all three major New York area airports combined.  Before 1963 travelers to New York would emerge from the tunnel under the Hudson into a spectacular cathedral to trains, a grand place befitting a world-dominating city. Now they are disgorged into a dirty, grungy rabbit warren with claustrophobically low ceilings and foul air.

I pass through this place twice every day.  I am in it so often that I my brain doesn't really register what my eyes see. I once joked that I could walk through Penn Station and pass right on by Dick Cheney administering fellatio to Satan. I know there are hundreds of thousands of fellow commuters who have the same relationship to the place that I do.  I would like to slow down a bit and actually take a look around.  That's what this series will be all about.

The Many Frustrations and Small Pleasures of Commuting Through Penn Station

This week my job began again after the summer break, so I have been making my morning rail commute from Newark to New York City after a long hiatus.  This means the twice daily slog through Penn Station, a place I have grown to know intimately, and to dislike with the intensity that only familiarity can understand.  

It is a perpetually busy place, the most patronized train station in the United States, servicing hundreds of thousands of passengers every day.  You wouldn't know such a thing approaching it on foot in midtown Manhattan, since the station sits underneath Madison Square Garden, like an afterthought.  The original Penn Station, built around a century ago, was a grandiose, gorgeous marble colossus, a kind of pilgrimage cathedral for those coming into New York City for the first time.  In one of the most heinous crimes against taste and historical architecture every committed, the station was demolished in the early 1960s to make way for the current multi-use site, the kind of postwar all-purpose space that manages to do several things wrong at the same time.

In the main Amtrak area they have put up photographs of the old station (like the one above) in all of its glory, which mock the modern-day traveler and commuter, surrounded as s/he is by the functionalist dystopia of the current station.

Today the most important train station in the nation's biggest city is effectively Madison Square Garden's basement.  Like a lot of basements, it's grungy and lacking in charm.  It's also laid out in a highly haphazard fashion, which I learned the hard way, since I have to get from one station to the other in order to transfer from my train from New Jersey onto the 123 subway line.  The most obvious path from one to the other is the main promenade, which is usually so crowded that it takes forever to fight through the masses on my way to the subway.  (More on the promenade in a second.)  I tried to find a different path, and soon discovered that I could avoid the crowds by winding my way through low-ceilinged corridors that run through past the Long Island Railroad terminals.  There's lots of exposed pipe and air conditioning vents with a fearsome amount of lint waving from them.  The floors in these pathways look like they haven't been cleaned since the Ford administration.  I have seen dried puke so old it was calcified on more than one occasion.  In the winter time homeless people bed down on these same floors, and I often have to be careful not to step on them.

However, once I finally complete the journey to other end of the station, I do at least get to see some surreal sites.  Sitting right next to the subway turnstiles is a fancy raw bar in what must be the most incongruous location possible.  I have long wanted to have a meal there, wondering who else would stop for fancy dining at the end of a dingy corridor that most of the shlubs who use Penn Station are unaware of.  Also, standing right there, are people hawking the local free papers (Morning Metro and AM New York), which are mostly made up of advertisements for things like treatments for vericose veins.

As much as I dislike my slog through Penn Station, I felt a little sad this morning because the guy usually handing out AM New York wasn't there today.  I loved seeing him because he really went after his job with gusto, bellowing out "AM New York, read all about it, AM New York!" in a tough Noo Yawk accent that made his words sound almost like a threat.  I don't know if he got paid extra for handing out a higher number of papers, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was the best selling vender in the city.  Hopefully he's found better employment, or gets to hawk papers in a spot with more air and light.

When I come back to Penn Station after work, I play a little game I call "Subway Olympics." I try to position myself so that I jump on the right car where I get on at 72nd street, and find a spot by the door so that when it opens I jump out first and am within steps of the stairs leading down off of the platform.  I then dash down the stairs as fast as I can, take a sharp left turn, and jet through the turnstiles like a runner hitting the finish line.  Others seem to have the same idea, I've only won gold a handful of times.

When I go home at the end of the day I usually just walk down the main tunnel of the station to the New Jersey Transit terminal, rather than negotiating the corridors, which are much more crowded in the late afternoon, making them unbearably stuffy.  Right where I get off the subway there are usually musicians playing with amps, and often surprisingly poorly for having the best busking location in the city.  I also must dodge oncoming commuters, get around slow-moving tourists, and generally hustle in order to get to my train on time.  As I do, I pass through one of the more surreal shopping and dining experiences this world has to offer.  There are several little bakeries, one of which actually sells some tasty empanadas (I was really hungry late at night one time.)  There are all manner of convenience stores, many of which have big tubs of ice out front spilling over with tall boy cans of beer.  When I look closely at my fellow passengers on a commuter train home, I will see a few of them discreetly sipping these from brown bags.

Amidst the smaller stores sits a K Mart, just the retailer you'd expect to find in a dingy underground train station.  There's also the usual and unusual fast food.  You can grab grub at McDonald's and KFC, of course, but also Nathan's Hot Dogs and Tim Horton's.  (The latter is a personal favorite of mine from my trips to Canada.)  All that food attracts more than people, of course.  I'll never forget seeing a dead rat splayed out on the steps leading from the Amtrak terminal to the main tunnel, right around the corner from the Auntie Ann's where I sometimes grab a pretzel for the ride home.

In a few weeks, once I make the commute more regularly again, I'm sure my eyes will get less sharp and my senses numb.  I might not see the dried vomit, dead rats, and brown bags anymore.  I won't smell the stale sweat of tightly packed human bodies, or the sweet scent of fresh croissants, either.  That blase insensitivity is the price Manhattan extracts for the exhilaration of its endless spectacle.