Seeing some lights on Pennsylvania Station’s upper floors promised what the future holds. The 1911 Amtrak and MARC depot is beginning a $175 million journey — and perhaps much more, if an ambitious development of the Station North neighborhood materializes.
The talk of refurbishing Penn Station and its environs began in 2012. That proposal stage is now over and construction barriers arrived after the holidays. Scaffolding began to rise up the walls a few weeks ago.
Some of the rusting platforms, neglected for decades, are being torn apart for a thorough reconditioning.
“By the end of the year the exterior walls will shine and glow,” said Charles Bond, development director for Beatty Development Group, which is working alongside Cross Street Partners on this project, which mixes preservation of the Beaux Arts-styled station with modern rail technology.
At a meeting of the Urban Land Institute this week, the developers of the station project outlined some of the changes to look for this year and beyond.
While the main station floor is a busy arrival and departure point for the city, the station’s upper floors have been dingy and vacant since the 1970s. They are to be reworked as modern offices.
The exterior windows are way overdue for putty and paint. The station’s upper floors are dark at night, but a few former railroad offices have been lighted to show that change is on its way.
Bill Struever, a principal of Cross Street Partners, likes to show off the old electrical power director’s office, a high-voltage chamber strictly off limits to the public. He predicts the massive power control board can be disassembled and become an historical centerpiece for the new wing of Penn Station to be built on Lanvale Street.
Plans call for a glassy addition there to serve more passengers. Amtrak will add a new high speed rail platform too and plans to add additional Acela service.
“There was a minimum of one and sometimes two power directors in this office 24/7,” said John Stanford, a retired Amtrak employee who worked in the Baltimore train dispatching office until the 1980s. “Their specific function was the control of the high voltage transmission lines and the overhead wires that fed electric train motors and signal lines.”
Stanford said the sprawling control boards and their associated indicator lights and switches actually indicated the status of these circuits, whether on or off.
The projected rebirth of the station is complicated by some nettlesome infrastructure issues.
The Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, built in 1871 under the Bolton Hill, Upton and the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhoods, bottlenecks rail traffic through the city along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.
A costly new tube, named for Frederick Douglass, could shorten the travel time on the fastest train to Washington to 18 minutes, Struever said. He also predicts travel to Philadelphia in an hour.
Struever said that two-thirds of the passengers who come and go here are commuters to Washington, D.C., or a few other spots in Harford and Cecil counties. The remaining third of the passengers are travelers along the Northeast Corridor, which stretches from Boston to D.C., or to other destinations.
Surveying the station’s present state, Chris Seiler, a Beatty development marketing official, said: “This place has not been touched for 40 years. Inside and out, it gets the works. We need to return it to its original luster.”
There is a separate, ambitious master plan for the Station North community that envisions glassy buildings scattered along on at least six parcels of land from Greenmount Avenue to the North Avenue Bridge.
Struever believes that once the station is enlarged, its historic components restored and its exterior walls grandly illuminated, developers will build on these land parcels that now function as parking lots or vacant lots.
“The station is truly a regional hub,” Struever said. “It’s a real launch pad. I believe the prosperity of the city will depend, one day, of being able to get around without a car.”
