You Had Me at "Fecal Deluge"

Bloomberg reporter Devin Leonard put out a very good article a couple weeks ago on the decrepit (and decaying!) cesspool that is New York Penn Station. I wanted to share it with you all, considering some of us still do or used to navigate through that area. The article link is here.

It is a long read, but an entertaining one. Mr. Leonard adds some flair to his prose, instead of sticking to straight-laced reporting, which makes it more fun to read. I wish he had pushed the envelope more, to be honest, and added a true Hunter Thompson-esque angle to this. He ignored the topics of the homeless crisis, and overlooked the horrendous bathroom conditions (in terms of odor AND the men who linger there for anonymous sexual encounters amidst the stench).

The article is too long to post, but I copied some snippets below. The conditions of this train station and its impact on my daily commute were a big driver of my slow descent into functional alcoholism (joking, but not really), a hole I'm trying to climb out of today. It's why I lugged my family to Dallas in '14 and to Denver in '15 to explore other parts of 'Murica.

With that said, let's get to some of my favorite parcels from Leonard's writing:

All who schlep through the complex are united by a powerful urge to leave.

A few weeks later, a sewage pipe spewed waste onto a heavily trafficked concourse—an honest-to-God shit-storm. 'I’m like, "Literally, it’s raining in Penn Station,"  recalls Marigo Mihalos, a booking agent from New Jersey who witnessed the fecal deluge on her way to work. 

Penn Station is a debacle reaching across time. Its past is a slow-motion disaster of inaction and canceled reforms, its present an ongoing disgrace. And its future could be truly catastrophic, in the form of a tunnel failure that pinches shut one of the most vital economic arteries in America.

The addition of New Jersey Transit trains in the 1990s was both an economic boon to the region — "I bought a house in Maplewood, N.J., in 1996 so I could ride the new Midtown Direct to work — and the beginning of Penn Station’s transformation from mere malodorous eyesore to Hieronymus Bosch-grade hellhole."

In 2015 the governors of New York and New Jersey agreed to a deal on Gateway: The states would pay half the cost of building new tunnels to Penn, and the Obama administration pledged that the federal government would cover the other half. That year and the next, Donald Trump campaigned as the guy who would rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, promising a $1 trillion plan to repair roads, bridges, tunnels, the electrical grid, and more. It was possible to think that Penn Station might be saved. But after Trump was elected, the New York City native dashed those hopes. He eliminated billions in funding for Gateway-related projects in his 2018 budget. And in the waning days of 2017, Trump made it official: His administration would not abide by the Obama-era commitment to pay for half of the new tunnels.