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Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark
Penn Station was a real loss. New York learned from their mistakes, but I'm not sure Halifax has even realized that it has made mistakes much less having learned from them as yet
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You are right that the 1963 destruction of Pennsylvania Station, a magnificent beaux-art monument to 20th century progress and mobility, was a tragedy on many levels.
There is room for hope, however. Slow progress continues toward the repurposing of the adjacent Farley Post Office Building as a new head house for Penn Station. Fittingly, the post office, like the original 1910 station, was designed by McKim, Mead & White and was its virtual twin.
The Penn Station tracks run beneath the post office so repurposing it to a rail and transit station is not at all far-fetched though it will not come cheap.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/ny...nnex.html?_r=0
Bringing the project much closer to realization, NYC council voted two years ago that the existing Madison Square Garden, which sits atop today's Penn Station, must be gone by 2023.
http://www.rpa.org/library/pdf/RPA-MAS-Penn-2023.pdf
Halifax's railway station, a much more modest affair, was also designed in beaux-art style by John Smith Archibald and opened in 1928.
Worth noting, for fans of irony, that the original Penn Station was itself an urban renewal project, built on the ruins of the old Manhattan Tenderloin district, derided by the day's civic reformers as a slum and home to all sorts of immorality and vice. No doubt today its destruction would be protested by heritage and civic groups of all sorts.