What a mess! Every day as we head to and from our offices atop Penn Station, we push through swarms of harried commuters, disoriented tourists, and fast-moving New Yorkers in the multilevel, underground purgatory that serves Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, and six different lines of the city’s subway system. As nearly everyone knows, this artificially lighted, soul-sapping labyrinth replaced the soaring architecture of McKim, Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station, which opened in 1910 and fell to the wrecking ball 53 years later. It’s ironic that the offices of Architectural Record reside in a dreary building on the site of perhaps the greatest architectural crime of the 20th century.

For more than a decade, an evolving cast of public and private players has been hashing out schemes to redevelop Penn Station and bring back some of the old wow. First proposed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1990s, the project would move Amtrak to the James A. Farley Post Office Building, which McKim, Mead & White designed as a Beaux-Arts sibling facing Penn Station across Eighth Avenue. While the post office’s grand colonnaded facade on Eighth Avenue would still welcome people looking to buy stamps and mail packages, the rest of the enormous, block-long (and block-wide) building and many levels below it would be converted into space for an intercity train station, retail, and all sorts of improved rail infrastructure.