William Rutherford Mead, last surviving member of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White, died in 1928. He was thus spared the sight of the enormous metal flange, 50 feet high by 350 feet long, which was recently hung in the main room of his firm’s master-work, the Pennsylvania Station in New York. Speaking for myself, I got an unpleasant shock as I came down the escalator from the Seventh Avenue arcade, and saw this huge object for the first time. It forms an indoor roof for the new ticket facilities which have been built across the passage through which travelers formerly entered the concourse, thus forcing them to left and right from the natural axis of the building. Since the designers modeled the great room on the Tepidarium of a Roman bath, and the suspended rim is World’s Fair Modern, the effect is one of excruciating discord. And it is hard to see the railroad’s reason for such a savage assault on visual harmony.
Some have advanced the theory that the Pennsylvania, desperate under its load of red tape and taxes, has in this threatening edge of metal symbolically placed a knife at its own throat. I could sympathize with the railroad officials if this was their symbolic meaning, but of course nothing of the sort was intended. The spoiling of the splendid room means only that a new architectural age has arrived in New York City, and that those landmarks which are too massive for immediate destruction will be altered piecemeal, starting from within. Meanwhile, more than one hundred new skyscrapers, glistening with metal and glass, will have been completed in Manhattan by 1960. I hereby beg leave to doubt that this is a good thing.
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