A Survey of Pennsylvania Railroad Stations


List of Pennsylvania Railroad stations:

List of jointly operated stations:

New York Pennsylvania Station – McKim Mead & White

Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection: exterior & interior
Newark Pennsylvania Station – McKim Mead & White

Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress) & Newark Pennsylvania Station Interior
Philadelphia 30th Street Station

Historic American Engineering Record (Library of Congress)
Baltimore Pennsylvania Station

Historic American Engineering Record (Library of Congress)
Pittsburgh, PA Pennsylvania Station

Historic American Buildings Survey (Library of Congress)
Cincinnati Union Station

Central Union Station
Detroit Publishing Co. no. 071318.
Washington DC Union Station

National Photo Company Collection (Library of Congress).
Chicago Union Station

leftIn the waiting room of the Union Station & right Union Station concourse Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
Cincinnati Union Terminal

Union Terminal looking west
Historic American Buildings Survey (Library of Congress)

NSA’s Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World

Data TransferIllustration: Copyrighted Map Courtesy of Telegeography
While smogr is not a political website, politics influences design, architecture and urbanism.

NSA’s Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World
A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world’s internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

It is not by coincidence that the world’s centers of commerce and technology are dense with data transfer facilities. A corollary to the 2007 Submarine Cable Map.

Jean Nouvel’s MoMA Tower Unveiled

Jean Nouvel MoMA Tower
Next to MoMA, a Tower Will Reach for the Stars:

A new 75-story tower designed by the architect Jean Nouvel for a site next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation. Its faceted exterior, tapering to a series of crystalline peaks, suggests an atavistic preoccupation with celestial heights. It brings to mind John Ruskin’s praise for the irrationality of Gothic architecture: “It not only dared, but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle.”
Commissioned by Hines, an international real estate developer, the tower will house a hotel, luxury apartments and three floors that will be used by MoMA to expand its exhibition space. The melding of cultural and commercial worlds offers further proof, if any were needed, that Mr. Nouvel is a master at balancing conflicting urban forces.

Did anyone else open their Arts Section this morning and exclaim, Holy Crap!

Accessible Transit – London Underground

For most of us just getting around the major subway systems of the world is difficult enough. What would a transit system look like if you were disabled or in a wheelchair? I became very curious in this and started to collect maps of different transit systems around the world.

London-Underground-detail

Accessible Transit – London Underground Detail

And then it occurred to me: if maps virtually represent life, through convenient fictions, then why are there no maps for those who are disabled or require additional accessibility? Wouldn’t the mother with newborn in stroller need a different map then those without the need to lug all the accoutrement’s of childhood? Equally, those in a wheelchair require a map different then one which the walking can use. I decided to rectify the situation by editing the maps of major metropolitan transportation systems, in order to create a map for those who are not represented on the official map.

My first Accessible Transit Map was the London Underground map, which can be downloaded in the following versions:

As you can see from the detail below, those of you needing better accessibility have limited options; the DLR and the Jubilee Line are your best choices.

London-Underground-small

I realize that Transport for London has been making great strides in retrofitting many stations in order to comply with DDA requirements. TfL is doing what they can with hundreds of years old infrastructure and have an extensive transport accessibility system including Dial-a-Ride, which will pick up a disabled person and transport them. They are installing tactile warning surfaces on stairs and at the platform edge, and I’ve noticed the staff is generally helpful to those with disabilities.

But all of this doesn’t change the fact that maps have an intrinsic reality; a reality which those of us with proper ambulatory functions take for granted. Of course Transport for London won’t issue this map as an official Underground map because the map looks really, really bad (not to mention this would be really confusing for the Yank tourists). Not even half of the system’s tube stations – I count 82 out of 275 stations – are accessible.

Lest my reader believes I am picking on the fair city of London, be still. The New York City Subway maps is coming soon; it took longer because the graphics file is horrendously large and difficult to work with.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities – Introduction

As this is the first entry in my smogr book club: The Death and Life of Great American Cities I would be interested in responses from my reader on how useful this is, and if there are any changes to the format would help out. Most of my book notes are noted for posterity and contain many quick thoughts (not necessarily insights).
The introduction is divided up into two parts: Thesis statement and History of “Orthodox Planning.” In the first half, Jacobs marshals many different anecdotal examples of city life, both positive and negative. Jacobs instantly goes on the offensive in order to position The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a direct attack on the status quo.
Book Notes

  • pg 9 – Morningside Heights and Slum Clearance
  • pg 9 – Attacks Ebenezer Howard, the Garden City, City Beautiful, & Modernism not by name but alludes to it
  • pg 10 – Not anti-car but car isn’t the main problem but a symptom
    I don’t know if I buy this, but I could take her word for it. I don’t know if she fully realized how much cheap personal transportation influenced and reinforced American culture
  • pg 11 – Mentions the North End of Boston
  • pg 16 – Mentions the West End of Boston and how the Northenders were afraid they would be wiped off the map and cleared of slums like what was done to the West End.
    By the way, the West End is completely horrible place to be, and whatever they did to that area is a crying shame. The giant hospital doesn’t help at all either.
  • pg 16 – Bankers make bad planners
    side note: this is try today, cf: the housing bubble and the acceleration of the suburbs
  • pg 19 – Thesis Statement
  • pg 19 – City needs diversity
  • pg 20 – Mentions Harlem Housing and the rectangular lawn _the man_ “gave” the people
  • pg 22 – Yesterday’s suburbs are todays slums

Now onto a history of Orthodox Planning.
Two strains:

  1. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Corbusier’s Radiant City – European theory and reaction to European slums (Howard) and the atrocities of World War I (Corbusier)
  2. Burnham’s City Beautiful – American excess and optimism

Book Notes

  • pg 23 – Orthodox Planning
  • pg 24 – Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City
  • pg 24 – Manifested in USA in model company towns
    aside: are there any modern company towns today??
  • pg 26 – Howard’s planning – “He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts.”
  • pg 27 – Attacks “The Decentrists” – Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Catherine Bauer. This was Bauer’s term.
  • pg 27 – design of the city not by the street but by the block and superblock
    I wonder if the effects of the “2nd Industrial Revolution” in the greater efficiencies and economies of scale which were becoming possible in the latter half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries is the root cause. Making capitalism more efficient was something which was a long time coming and there is no reason why building and the city wouldn’t see itself be unaffected.
  • pg 28 – Planned communities fenced off by farmland or parks held in trust. Paternal, daddy knows best.
  • pg 29 – Le Corbusier makes his entrance
  • pg 30 – Radiant City as utopia much like Howard’s Garden City
  • pg 31 – Radiant City acceptance due, in part, by his designing (for the first apparent time) for the automobile in the 1920’s.
  • pg 32 – Urban Renewal as the love child between Garden City and Radiant City
  • pg 32 – Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
    Burnham’s Paris on Lake Michigan
  • pg 33 – City Beautiful
    Civic Center as a disparate element in the city, like fair
  • pg 34 – List of failed Civic Centers
  • pg 34 – Sorting of culture out from city; Lincoln Center

Further Research

  • Bank lending leading to urban decay
    History, Redlining, Racism
  • Historical Utopias
    Garden City, Radiant City, City Beautiful, Burnham’s Chicago Plan
  • Frank Lloyd Wright’s agrarian city plan – Broadacre
    FLLW’s 1 acre per person utopia, and why don’t we hear about it at all?