Pennsylvania Station is currently the nation's most heavily trafficked transportation center. Its role as a monumental gateway to New York City, both at the beginning of the 20th century and as projected in the 21st, is the focus of an exhibition to go on view Feb. 2, at Columbia's Wallach Art Gallery on the 8th floor of Schermerhorn. Entitled Gateway to Metropolis: New York's Pennsylvania Stations, the exhibition will present the first comprehensive look at the heralded design for a new train station by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The exhibit will also offer a critical reflection on the original building designed by McKim, Mead and White, which was demolished in the 1960s.

More than 120 drawings, models, photographs, documents and architectural fragments have been assembled for public view by the exhibition's curator, Associate Professor of Art History Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian.

Ballon explained her motivation for organizing the exhibition: "I thought this would be an unusual opportunity to build a bridge for our students from the historical work we do at Columbia to a matter of great contemporary concern for all New Yorkers." She was also inspired by the extensive McKim, Mead and White archives in Columbia's Avery Library. "Some of the material has never been publicly displayed before, for instance a stunning suite of 80 unpublished photographs of the construction of Penn Station, commissioned by the architects," she said. "On the eleventh day of every month from 1908 to 1910, Louis Dreyer, a New York photographer, documented the progress of the building. The skeleton of the structure emerges from the ground in a most dramatic way." The photographs will be hung in the exhibition and will also be presented as a slide show.

When Penn Station opened in 1910, it redefined the idea of the train station. It was the first in the United States built for the age of smoke-free, electric trains, and it was New York's grandest building, even larger than St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The architect Charles Follen McKim (who was also responsible for the design of Columbia's Morningside Heights campus) was aware of the function and urban symbolism of the train station, and conceived the building as a "monumental gateway and entrance to one of the great Metropolitan cities of the world."

Public Programs

A series of gallery talks will be held in conjunction with the exhibition Gateway to Metropolis: New York's Pennsylvania Stations. Speakers include project architect Marilyn Taylor of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who will speak about the design of the new station on Feb. 15. Christopher T. Baer, who oversees the Pennsylvania Railroad Company archives at the Hagley Museum and Library, will speak about railroad history on Feb. 24; the photographer Norman McGrath will lecture on the demolition of old Penn Station on March 2; and Alexandros E. Washburn, head of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corporation, will discuss redevelopment of the site on March 9. Free to the public, all talks take place in the Wallach Gallery at 6:00 p.m. and will be followed by a reception. The public may call 854-2877 for more information or check the Columbia Record's Calendar page for listings.