Clews & Curios · Historical Background
Before Penn Station
A vanished 1890s neighborhood — row houses, gas lamps, and the streets Joe Phenix might have pursued a suspect through.
Before the majestic Pennsylvania Station rose at Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street, a sprawling neighborhood of row houses, small businesses, and immigrant families occupied the site. In the 1890s — the setting for the Dark Lantern Tales stories — this was a working-class quarter where Joe Phenix might have pursued a suspect through narrow streets still unpaved and lit by gas.
From the wonderful Ephemeral New York website, an article with period photographs documents the vanished neighborhood that was demolished to make way for one of the great architectural achievements of American urban design. The original Penn Station, completed in 1910, was itself later destroyed in 1963 — an act of civic vandalism that helped launch the modern historic preservation movement.
Pennsylvania Station, New York City, 1909 — the McKim, Mead and White masterpiece, photographed not long after before it opened.
The story is one of layers: a neighborhood replaced by a masterpiece, replaced in turn by something far less distinguished. It is a pattern repeated across New York, and one that the Dark Lantern Tales series captures at its earliest stages.
Read at Ephemeral New York
“Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that McKim, Mead and White’s masterpiece would really be demolished.”
— Ada Louise Huxtable