The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station
Diehl, Lorraine B.
from taking him seriously as a "great" writer. (Norman Mailer once called Jones "the worst writer of prose ever to give intimations of greatness.") And as good as it is, From Here to Eternity is...
...beautiful place, however obsolescent...
...Anyone who lives here knows that Madison Square Garden has almost never been in Madison Square, because there was always a bigger buck to be had by moving the thing to another location...
...There is good news for those who left McPhee at the limestone quarry...
...These contradictions will not sort themselves out, just as New York will continue to enrapture the eye because of its own lunatic juxtapositions—of walk-ups and trade towers, terraced brownstones and skyscraping slivers...
...Diehl's excellent book has any conspicuous flaw, it is her title, for large portions of the narrative, as well as many of the extraordinary photographs and maps, are really about the clawing out of tubes under the Hudson River that would eventually bring the Pennsylvania's trains into the gigantic new station that Cassatt dreamed of and McKim designed...
...In this and other essays, McPhee returns to a couple of well-tried techniques, the police blotter and the Greek chorus...
...THE LATE, GREAT PENNSYLVANIA STATION Lorraine B. Diehl/American Heritage Press-Houghton Mifflin/$19.95 Thomas Mallon 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 Chapter One is a picture of one of Adolph Weinman's stone maidens, slain at the waist and dumped with trash in the Jersey Meadowlands...
...Alcoholically limbered, his head took a pleasant spin upwards and, for the first time, he noticed that the station's tiny ceiling lights are in fact laid out as points in the northern constellations...
...He gives all sides...
...Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, puts it in a foreword...
...It tried to delay doom by selling the old station for a mess of air rights...
...1 year $21 ^ 2 years $39 ^ 3 years $55 Name Address City State Zip X620 P.O...
...The locale of the piece is semi-rural Maine, where a number of idealistic doctors went to work beginning in the early 1970s...
...Eighteen years after Cassatt had first seen the baths of Caracalla Charles McKim was fortuitously entranced by the same sight...
...The power companies were required to buy the electricity at favorable rates as a result of a law passed in 1978 to ease dependence on foreign oil...
...There was far more than the station's destruction to upset him in the 1960s, but I'm sure that somewhere in his shy being he felt a loss, and that that August pro-test demonstration was the only one he ever exempted from scorn...
...Thirtynine-year-old female presents with a sore throat...
...We went out for dinner and had a few, and at the end of the evening were weaving through Grand Central station, which still stands (though never so magnificently as the old Penn Station did...
...When he chooses to express an opinion, it gains credibility from his respect for those who disagree...
...McPhee ex-amines the careers of a dozen young physicians who, having become fed up with specialization and high tech in Jacob Weisberg is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic...
...medical school, wanted to get back to helping people with their basic problems, ranging from hernias to marital spats...
...Cassatt spent seventeen years of what should have been his prime in premature retirement, preferring sailing and horses and the company of his wife to the business dealings he was so good at...
...In fact, my friend left for home the next morning by plane, because that's the way you go home these days, but it doesn't matter: he had an exit, however symbolic, from a There are those who like to say that John McPhee has lost it...
...It's the sort of thing they don't do in Burlington, Iowa, and I think that moment of unexpected awe on his last night in the city made up for a lot...
...On August 2, 1962, he must have passed the preservationists picketing on Seventh Avenue against its destruction...
...serious fiction is in a slump of unprecedented magnitude...
...And as good as it is, From Here to Eternity is still a piece of popular fiction, an amalgam of middle-period Hemingway and fondly remembered thirties movies marred by a truly corny whore-with-aheart-of-gold subplot introduced in all seriousness as a philosophical statement about the nature of romantic love...
...Subscribe or renew today...
...Facing the first page of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Tyrrell yearns for your company...
...He experienced something on the order of what millions of passengers used to experience as they came into the old Pennsylvania Station, hoisting their luggage of hopes into Manhattan ordragging their disappointments back home...
...Diehl's book is impassioned...
...Riding the Boom Extension" celebrates the advent of the telephone in the farthest reaches of the Yukon, and "Ice Pond" glorifies Princeton physicist Theodore Taylor's bizarre air-conditioning scheme...
...The feeling when you approached it," says Brendan Gill, "was awe and intimidation...
...Diehl has a grand time talking about how it all was while it lasted, providing us with photographs of Ethel Barrymore on the Broadway Limited and of station-master Bill Egan surrounded by his own pictures of American Presidents...
...No doubt one of Mr...
...liventynine-year-old female presents with lesions of genital herpes...
...Except, that is, for one particularly American touch: the waiting room had no benches—an extraordinary national in-junction to be up and doing...
...Between 1910 and 1963 it flew, with twenty-one others, above the Doric columns marking the entrance to a Roman wonder in which "everything grand and beautifuland uplifting . . . was designed for the man or woman who caught a train...
...The photographs she has gathered harrow the reader even more than her text...
...He portrays pioneering physicians who share a Norman Rockwellian vision of American medicine: doctors who are cheerily bringing large segments of the population the medical care they want, toting their black bags to make $25 house calls...
...We are acutely aware that the woman might live longer if she followed the advice of a specialist...
...He is again writing short, varied, and readable articles...
...If Mrs...
...The former find themselves battling to save grand old buildings from capitalist predation, deliberately forgetting that the grand old buildings were themselves once flung up by capitalist predators...
...A whole ribbon of Manhattan, from east to west under the Thirties, was excavated for the sake of the trains...
...The result was colossal: "As in the great cathedrals of Europe, the separate elements of Pennsylvania Station coalesced into a unified form that em-braced the human spirit...
...What do you do about the gorgeous particulars that get trampled under all the collective, kinetic magnificence...
...And where instinct is weak, the law takes over...
...McPhee, on the other hand, truly approaches Christopher Isherwood's ideal of literary photography...
...These dizzying works, part of a planned four-volume geologic survey of North America, projected exactly the opposite quality...
...Another piece where McPhee impresses the reader with his fair-mindedness is "Minihydro," which relates the rush of entrepreneurs in New York State to refurbish abandoned water mills with turbines and sell the electricity to power companies...
...Doctor Jones says okay...
...The crowds began to leave after the Second World War...
...John Hersey...
...The wrecking ball took its first swipe on October 28, 1963...
...McPhee's chorus technique, which is also an impressionistic device, has an altogether different value...
...She writes in a clear and moving way, only rarely slipping into the bland and generalizing style of documentary voiceover...
...Clearly, tunnels were in order...
...Mrs...
...His talent for making animals, trees, and exotic parts of the country appealing to those of us who don't ordinarily read about such things seemed to have all but disappeared in his recent books, Basin and Range (1981) and In Suspect Ter-rain (1983...
...A few months ago I said goodbye to a friend of mine, a native Iowan, who was leaving New York after a year teaching school here...
...In 1968 the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the New York Central, an amalgamation that must have given robber barons gravespins...
...McPhee's range of topics—from hydroelectric power to the bears of New Jersey to Senator Bill Bradley—is typically astounding...
...But when the gigantic Pennsy, after passing through a mediocre patch, offered him its presidency in 1899, he took it...
...What they mean is that McPhee, whose best writing has made environmental and scientific topics accessible to general readers, has grown increasingly exhaustive and esoteric of late...
...It may surprise those who consider McPhee a knee-jerk supporter of environmental regulation that he takes his stand against "conservationists [who] hate dams, no matter how large they are...
...You see how much she wanted a biscuit...
...Herman Wouk...
...Amtrak and Conrail took over, having been left with a new station worthy of their charm and performance...
...Dogmatism is utterly alien to his writing...
...The longest essay, "Heirs of General Practice," which details a trend toward the "new" medical specialty of family practice, is a paradigm of McPhee's best writing...
...Until I read Lorraine B. Diehl's new book I never knew that the sculpted eagle squatting before the new station on a pedestal marked "1%8" is actually one of those that Adolph A. Weinman carved for the old station...
...He knows that developers pose a threat to the environment, but that if we respected every shrub as much as we could, we would build nothing and go nowhere...
...In the end, Into Eternity serves chiefly as a distressing reminder of the runaway inflation which mars the American literary scene today...
...nervous academics, having run out of new things to say about Kafka, are falling on the likes of James Jones like a ton of bricks...
...By the early sixties the Pennsy was quickly going broke...
...And yet...
...By the time I commuted in with him, to a summer job in his office in '68 and '69, a new Pennsylvania Station was the terminus for the Long Island Railroad...
...But by 1908 one could walk from Jersey City to Long Island City...
...He quotes, without comment and often at great length, a number of conventional specialists who regard family medicine as a dangerous swindle, saying things like, "Family practitioners do not have anything special to offer patients beyond a mix of superficially developed clinical skills," and "They do not possess much of the implicit information about patients and their families to which they lay claim in their self-descriptions...
...This technique gives some idea of what a family practitioner confronts in the course of an average day...
...Conservatives want the market to work its will but still can't bear seeing the remnants of what they think was a more graceful culture bulldozed for yet more Plasticretins...
...The station made some vain attempts to keep up with the streamlined times—in the late fifties a clamshell ticket counter aped an airline terminal's—but it inevitably turned into a "soot-laden tomb" that people were (at first) not sorry to see go...
...Constructed out of materials from the Plasticrete Corporation of Hamden, Connecticut, as opposed to the old station's travertine marble, it looked, and still does, more or less like a looted K-Mart...
...After all, how else is a starving young assistant professor going to get tenure these days...
...But we are also reminded that there is more to life than its duration, which specialized medicine often overlooks...
...That millions fewer will ever have such a moment is reason enough for those who sat, twenty-five years ago, on the boards of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Madison Square Garden Corporation to call out, from Purgatory, an apology to the more elevated shades of Alexander Cassatt and Charles McKim...
...Whoever it may be, you can count on one thing: he'll emerge from this thoughtful new revaluation as an underrated classic...
...Eating is important, and it's one of the few recreations some older people have," he tells McPhee...
...If there were a theme to the book it would be this kind TABLE OF CONTENTS John McPhee/Farrar Straus Giroux/$15.95 Jacob Weisberg THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 53...
...Just in time for the American century, those tunnels gave the United States a functioning heart...
...The station's "brief, emotion-filled life" (just fifty-three years) paralleled the unforeseen decline of railroading...
...A surprising number of these essays praise development of one kind or another...
...What can I do for you...
...It gives the nay-sayers a chance to get a word in, without condescension or slighting their arguments...
...I wonder if he paid them any notice, since my father tended to equate all placards with subversion, and since the walk along 34th Street from his office to the station eventually became a gauntlet of 3-card monte hustlers and Hare Krishnas, something to be made with fast feet and downcast eyes...
...soaring (its waiting room modeled on the baths of Caracalla in ancient Rome), that opened on September 8, 1910...
...The scale of the whole place was, in fact, as frightening as it was ennobling...
...This unholy alliance ended in bankruptcy two years later...
...Scholarly biographies are pulling down sixIV!y father was a railroad commuter, and for years he would come home from Manhattan to Long Island through the old Pennsylvania Station, a miracle, somehow both massive and Thomas Mallon teaches English at Vassar College and is the author of A Book of One's Own...
...New Order ^ Renewal (please attach mailing label...
...By the 1920s ridership was still rising, but automobiles and airplanes were coming off assembly lines in irresistible challenge...
...Much of the family practice piece adopts the log book form: "Thirty-two-year-old male presents with warts on his penis...
...he understands the need to accommodate development...
...Along with the new ventricles running under the Hudson, auricles were dug between Manhattan and Queens, taming the East River for the Long Island Railroad (owned by the Pennsylvania...
...It also helps to dispel some of the romanticism a lesser writer wouldn't be able to resist...
...There are two heroes in Mrs...
...Before all the jobs were done, streets collapsed and windows shattered, and workers drowned or got crippled by the bends...
...The great redeeming irony of the story is that the old station died a "heroically useful death," as Mr...
...Still, Mrs...
...charming lightweights like Jay McInerney are being touted as voices of a generation...
...In the last twenty years New York, reacting with a delayed sense of shame, has been slower at self-amputation...
...Thus McPhee can't be accused of only listening to doctors who are happy with their lives and patients who are happy with their doctors...
...McPhee describes one poignant scene in a doctor's office where a 77-year-old woman comes asking for permission to eat her favorite foods—biscuits and ice cream...
...In "Heirs of General Practice," a consensus does emerge: that the trend in question is democratic and healthy...
...the willingness to think twice is already instinctive...
...Diehl's book: Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Charles McKim, head of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White (the White being Stanford White...
...Box 10448, Arlington, VA 22210...
...figure advances...
...So when it came time to build the station, the client was able to find an architect who dreamed the same language...
...Ann Gavin's Irish-accented voice still called out departure times to those in the waiting room, but the real departures were permanent ones to the suburbs—all made in automobiles traveling roads built with federal highway funds...
...When the Duke of Windsor showed up in Penn Station requiring attendance, Egan greeted him by saying: "How are you, Prince...
...MacShane's students is about to give us the lowdown on yet another forgotten American...
...They were tedious and obscure, unlikely to make the Mesozoic Era appeal to anyone who didn't already spend his free time cracking rocks...
...The station that sat atop these arterial triumphs cost $90 million to build...
...Office buildings and a new Madison Square Garden would, according to the scheme, rise above a new subterranean station, "a bleak parody of railroad stations in general and a tragic joke in comparison with its magnificent predecessor...
...Places like that, palaces en route, allowed the traveler to see his life in mythic terms for a minute or two, with the hopes higher, the disappointments more desperate...
...Architectural preservation makes annoyed bedfellows of liberals and conservatives...
...A number of writers identified withthe New Journalism—a term which fits McPhee not at all-have adopted these techniques...
...McPhee is an environmental realist...
...He'd suffered a fairly common defeat at the city's hands, and after a broke, roach-ridden year, he was ready to call it quits...
...That's how New York is, and to stop that would be to make New York into another, lesser place...
...But one comes away understanding the drawbacks of the new phenomenon as well...
...If it keeps her cholesterol slightly elevated, what's lost...
...Table of Contents reprints his last eight short pieces from the New Yorker, which has published practically everything he has written since 1963...
...One reason he did was the chance to end an absurdity that irked his imagination—namely, the need for railroad passengers coming to New York from the south and west to get off in Jersey City and reach Manhattan by ferry...
...But in the hands of a Nor-man Mailer or a Tom Wolfe, impressionism becomes far more of a weapon: the author quotes his source verbatim and ad nauseam, but only to mock his grammar or breeding...
...One learns the secrets of the Sunnyside train yards, where chefs "were specially trained in the `dummy diner,' a mock-up of a real dining car kitchen," and where there "was even a `tomato ripener,' whose job it was to shoot up tomatoes with ethylene gas so they would be ready for the salad chef...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
