Pennsylvania Station

Pennsylvania Station opened in New York City in 1910, designed by the firm McKim, Mead and White as the grand Manhattan terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad, its monumental facade and colonnades drawing directly on the Beaux-Arts classicism of ancient Roman public architecture, including a waiting room modeled in part on the Baths of Caracalla. Beneath its stone exterior, passengers descended into a vast steel-and-glass concourse that let natural light pour down onto the train platforms below, an engineering achievement paired with the building's deliberately imperial civic grandeur above. Despite its architectural significance, the railroad demolished the original station in 1963 to make way for a new Madison Square Garden and an office tower, a decision that provoked public outcry and is widely credited with launching the modern American historic preservation movement, directly leading to the landmark law that later protected Grand Central Terminal from a similar fate. A modernized Pennsylvania Station continues to operate underground on the same site today, though almost nothing of the original 1910 building survives above ground.