In the early 1900s, Pennsylvania Railroad passengers bound for Manhattan had to stop in New Jersey and cross the Hudson by ferry. Railroad president Alexander Cassatt, inspired by electric locomotives at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris, drove tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers and claimed an eight acre site from 7th to 8th Avenues and 31st to 33rd Streets, condemning 17 city buildings and buying over 300 parcels. Clearing it displaced thousands of residents of a largely African American community in the Tenderloin. McKim, Mead & White, led by Charles McKim, raised a Beaux Arts temple of pink granite with a waiting room modeled on the Roman baths of Caracalla, Diocletian, and Titus. It opened in 1910.

The station moved 144 trains an hour on 21 tracks and carried over 100 million passengers in 1945 alone. Then jets and interstate highways drained rail travel, the railroad posted its first operating losses in 1947, and the air above the station became worth more than the building. Developer Irving Mitchell Felt planned a new Madison Square Garden on top, and demolition began in October 1963 while trains kept running below. Critics including Ada Louise Huxtable condemned it, and its sculptures ended up in a New Jersey Meadowlands landfill. The shock produced New York’s Landmarks Preservation law in 1965, which saved Grand Central Terminal when its owners tried the same move in 1968.

• Why electric locomotives made miles of tunnels under two rivers possible where steam engines would have suffocated passengers
• The Roman bath plan as crowd control, with separate concourses for arriving and departing passengers
• The first major U.S. use of Italian travertine, Jules Guérin’s 70 foot wide murals, and the Day and Night maidens modeled by Audrey Munson
• About 500 steel columns sunk into the platforms to hold a protective deck while the headhouse came down overhead
• Vincent Scully’s verdict: one entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat