Michael Kimmelman, the fine architecture critic of The New York Times, has posted a utopian proposal to "Restore a Gateway to Dignity." It entails moving Madison Square Garden to a new location, and bringing back some measure of dignity and humanity to the tragedy and travesty which is Penn Station.His lament prompted the title of this post:

Nearly a half-century has passed since the destruction of the great 1910 station designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White, a monumental act of vandalism, as an editorial in The New York Times called the demolition in 1963. A vast steel, travertine and granite railway palace of the people, the old Pennsylvania Station had declined by the end into a symbol of bygone Gilded Age opulence. It was replaced by Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden, Modernist mediocrities, erected to serve real estate interests, with a new subterranean Penn Station entombed below.Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined.To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New Yorks exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.

His radical proposal is here.