Sunlight is not typically associated with the dingy basement vibe that envelops commuters passing through Penn Station.
But natural light spills across the new Moynihan Train Hall through its massive, 92-foot-high skylight ceiling and illuminates another surprise: permanent installations by some of the most celebrated artists in the world.
Kehinde Wiley, Stan Douglas and the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset have major pieces prominently displayed in the new $1.6 billion train hall set to open Friday, offering an expansion of Penn Station’s concourse space and serving customers of Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road. The hall, designed by the architecture firm SOM, also connects to subway lines, although they are some distance away.
The 255,000-square-foot train hall is inside the James A. Farley postal building, the grandiose Beaux-Arts structure designed by McKim Mead & White in 1912, two years after the original Pennsylvania Station. (New Yorkers may know the Farley Building from rushing up its giant staircase to file income taxes before midnight in mid-April.)
The new hall is named for Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, who first introduced plans for a renovation in the early 1990s, but they were mired in delays for years. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the driving force behind the project, in 2016 announced a public-private partnership for developing the hall, including Empire State Development, Vornado Realty Trust, Related Companies, Skanska and others.
The Moynihan Train Hall serves as a redemption of sorts for the doomed Penn Station, demolished in 1963 in an act deemed so heinous for the city’s historical buildings it is said to have kicked off the nascent national preservation movement.
The new hall fails to solve many of New York’s myriad transportation problems — congestion on the tracks, the need for a new tunnel under the Hudson River, the blight of the existing Penn Station, to name a few. But officials say it’s a necessary step to complete other transit projects, add more train capacity and to alleviate crowding at Penn Station.
The train hall opens at a time when citizens are being asked to refrain from nonessential travel to limit the spread of the coronavirus, and at a moment when commuter train traffic is extremely low.
But the governor has pointed to the achievement of delivering a major infrastructure project on time despite a pandemic, as well as one that would transcend the Covid-19 era. Mr. Cuomo called the new hall “deeply hopeful.”
“It speaks to the brighter days ahead when we will be able to congregate, to pass one another and to share the same space free of fear,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It promises renewal and rebirth of civic life in New York, and points to the opportunity ahead.”
The completion of the project — a station meant to welcome commuters and the rest of the world to New York — serves as a bright spot at the close of…