The recent remaking of a section of Manhattan’s West Side—a swath of Midtown stretching from Penn Station to Hudson Yards—is remarkable even for New York, a city that has defined itself with ambitious urban projects.
In an area that was once dominated by transit infrastructure serving the city’s largest rail hub, an entirely new district has claimed its place on the skyline. New public spaces and pedestrian pathways connect this district above and below ground—from the East End Gateway, which eases transfers between Penn Station and Moynihan Train Hall, to a new timber bridge that links Manhattan West to the High Line and Hudson Yards.
Visitors who walk seamlessly through this series of urban spaces might imagine that it was conceived as a grand urban design. In fact, it results from several discrete yet interconnected projects, many of them decades in the making. The West Side’s transformation, it could be said, happened gradually and then all at once. As a case study in incremental urbanism, it shows what is possible through persistence and commitment to a design vision centered on the public realm. First engaged in the late 1980s and almost continuously since that time, SOM shaped this series of projects that brought new life to the West Side. The result exemplifies how design must invent complex forms of urbanism in dense settings shaped by history and constrained by existing buildings and infrastructure.
Although driven by a core design ethos, SOM devised unique formal responses to diverse urban conditions to reconstruct a cohesive and walkable public realm. From the intimate integration of landscape and urbanism to the sensitive synthesis of new and old, from placemaking on a grand scale to the precise suturing of new architectural interventions into derelict transportation facilities, SOM’s acts of city-making were not divined by a singular hand to be implemented unilaterally. Rather, they required navigating complexity and devising nuanced design responses.
Taken together, the results create a seamless pedestrian route through the at-grade streets and sidewalks, the below-grade concourses and passageways, and the elevated plazas and prospects that constitute a new “32nd Street”—the urban corridor that was once erased west of Seventh Avenue to make way for an infrastructure of massive public works. Now reimagined and revitalized, it offers pedestrians a remarkable journey from the city’s most essential transit hub through some of its newest public spaces.
The journey begins and ends with two interventions modest in stature but monumental in impact. One intervention is a vertical slice through Manhattan’s mantle of macadam; the other is a muscular horizontal armature seamlessly linking the city’s streets to its magical garden in the sky.
At 7th Avenue and 33rd Street, the East End Gateway provides a new entrance to Penn Station, adding stairs and three escalators to enhance access, facilitate circulation, and improve wayfinding beneath a soaring glass canopy that punctuates the terminus of a blocks-long below-grade concourse. From the perspective of the commuter inside the station, the structure appears to rise dynamically, with the convex ceiling warping into an inverted and inclined glass funnel that brings abundant natural light into the station while also creating a vantage point that draws people up to the surface of the city and fixes their gaze on the pinnacle of its skyline—the Empire State Building’s spire.
This seemingly modest structure masks significant complexity. To be realized, it required negotiating a contested intersection, creating a broad at-grade plaza, and navigating a dense warren of underground utilities sandwiched between the street’s surface and the ceiling of the concourses below. The most delicate part of the dance was to find balance among jurisdictional purview, public purpose, and private real estate interests.
The result is an elegant urban sculpture that announces this new entrance to Penn Station and its Long Island Railroad, New Jersey Transit, and subway lines; importantly, the new entryway brings natural light into the 33rd Street Corridor, thereby conjuring a sublime and uplifting moment in a previously derelict corner of Penn Station.
Designed by Success
Designed by SOM and Field Operations at 10th Avenue and 31st Street, the High Line–Moynihan Connector constitutes a master class in persistence. Following years of previous efforts to realize the elusive vision of extending the High Line to the north and east, the Connector now physically manifests an idea strong enough to persist and compelling enough to motivate unlikely partnerships, as well as city and state agency support. It was made not as an extension of the High Line but instead as a discrete urban connection that embodies and complements the famed pathway’s strength, utility, and civic presence, while respecting its unique identity.
Safely elevated above the traffic-congested entrance ramps for the Lincoln Tunnel, the $50 million High Line–Moynihan Connector owes its existence to an exceptional design vision and Brookfield Properties’ years of persistent efforts that ultimately aligned with visionary support from the Empire State Development Corporation, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the not-for-profit Friends of the High Line.
The Connector comprises two pieces: a 260 foot long (80 m) timber truss bridge that is linked to an immersive 340 foot long (104 m) landscaped passage floating above 30th Street and Dyer Avenue. One block north, another elevated pedestrian space runs along the entire southern façade of 5 Manhattan West. A vestige of an earlier attempt to connect to the High Line, this “breezeway” is a remarkable two-story space carved from the interior of what was once derided as the ugliest building in New York City—a 1969 Brutalist structure that was reclad in 2017 with a faceted prismatic façade. This rare block-long south-facing public balcony—with seating nooks, raised planting beds, and movable tables and chairs, plus a public stair and elevator—provides a unique mid-block elevated view of the city, much like the one High Line itself offers.
At the center of the district, Moynihan Train Hall is the result of a decades-in-the-making endeavor to dramatically transform the travel experience for commuters throughout the region. With three railroads and two subway lines converging at Penn Station, more than 600,000 people annually traversed its concourses by the late 1990s and early 2000s—a number the station strained to accommodate. In the early 1990s, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put forth a vision to convert the James A. Farley Post Office, a nearly vacant, block-long building sitting above the rail tracks, into a train hall that would recapture the majesty of rail travel in New York while significantly relieving the overcrowding.
Third Time Is the Charm
Two earlier proposals by SOM—one in 1999 and the other in 2006—failed to materialize, but after a public/private partnership formed among Empire State Development Corporation, the Related Companies, and Vornado Realty Trust, SOM’s third design iteration became a reality.
In this landmark building, now named for the visionary senator, travelers ascend escalators to the vast space of the former mail-sorting room, where soaring glass skylights evoke the original Penn Station’s grandeur. The concourses span from 8th Avenue to 9th Avenue, right where 32nd Street once stood—restoring a vital pedestrian corridor that links the station with an entirely new development shaped by SOM: Manhattan West.
Located immediately west of Moynihan, Manhattan West is Brookfield Properties’ 7 million square foot (650,000 sq m) mixed-use masterpiece—a monumental project that introduced a vibrant and restorative pedestrian space within the congestion of West Midtown, replete with generous pathways, artfully sculpted stone planters, and engaging retail that fronts well-proportioned plazas. None of these amenities, however, were preordained.
The middle of Manhattan West was once envisioned—and, in fact, required—to have an overhead canopy covering its central open space. Beyond the obligation to provide this architectural enclosure, however, New York City’s zoning lacked any requirements for plantings, lighting, seating, or other public amenities to contribute to sociability or support walkability.
Thanks to the intense investment of time and effort on the part of Brookfield to secure an amendment to the city’s zoning resolution, the attendant creativity of the Department of City Planning to embrace a more enlightened vision, and the vision of landscape architects at Field Operations, Manhattan West has, at its core, plazas that seamlessly integrate and welcome the public.
Between Manhattan West’s 2.5 acres (1 ha) of open space and Moynihan’s epic interior lies 9th Avenue. Perhaps the most mundane aspect of urban walkability is the lowly crosswalk—a series of white painted stripes parallel to the street and perpendicular to the pedestrian. At 9th Avenue, however, this prosaic intervention migrates from its typical location, where streets and avenues intersect; it takes on profound significance as it restores the path of the long-lost West 32nd Street.
The public may be unaware of the ardor required to secure a coveted “mid-block crosswalk,” but as a result of this effort, thousands enjoy safe, convenient, and intuitive connectivity each and every day. Linking Moynihan’s retail corridor to Manhattan West’s verdant central plaza, this carefully calibrated and strategically located crosswalk demonstrates the power of a well-placed and thoughtfully conceived pedestrian crossing.
Optimism and a sense of civic obligation have driven generations of SOM’s designers to reshape Midtown Manhattan’s West Side by crafting a series of discrete commissions into a cohesive public realm. Year after year, scheme after scheme, and overcoming canceled or withdrawn projects and ever-shifting public priorities and private interests, the strength of an idea with the power of purpose and the conviction of connectivity persisted. The incremental realization of this aggregation of projects offers hope that cities can still do great things and build extraordinary public places.
