Grand Central Station Almost Met The Same Fate As Penn Station.

Fifty years on, New York City is still mourning the loss of the original Pennsylvania Station, a grand transit hub that was demolished in 1964 to make way for Madison Square Garden, in the steaming hellmouth that is now Penn Station reincarnate.

In 1965, in the immediate wake of the loss, New York City established a Landmarks Preservation Commission, tasked with saving the city's remaining historic architecture. Yet, as Kevin Baker writes at Harper's, Grand Central, a similarly grand monument to civic architecture, faced nearly the same fate a few years later. The political power struggle over it, Baker asserts, "says much about how we conduct business and politics in America today."

In the 1950s, New York Central Railroad, Grand Central's owner, viewed the station less as a landmark piece of city history and more as a potential cash cow. First, in 1954, it proposed replacing the terminal with a 108-story I.M. Pei skyscraper-a smaller-scale design of which was later embodied in the Met Life Building, just north of the station. In 1961, the New York Central Railroad wanted to build a bowling alley over Grand Central's Main Concourse, which would have lowered its 60-foot ceiling to just 15 miserable feet....Continue Reading

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