Stanley Judd: An Oral History Interview

An Oral History Interview with Stanley Judd
Conducted by Annette Rosen

ANNETTE ROSEN: Please tell us your name, and some remarks about your involvement with the demolition of Pennsylvania Station?

STANLEY JUDD: I'd be glad to. My name is Stanley Judd, and I became involved because Pennsylvania Station was a grand, dignified, serious, and harmonious railroad terminal. I was born in Brooklyn, and but for my years in college at Cornell (and I used Pennsylvania Station to get there), a judicial clerkship I had in Oregon, following graduation from law school, and summer vacations -- I spent all my life in New York, and I had never seen anything like Pennsylvania Station.
Many years later, I saw some drawings by Paranesi, and they reminded me of the isolated, haunted quiet of its immense and weighty pillars, marbled lobbies and staircases, rising to and descending into who knew where? And all this was just the introduction to the station -- the great interior square under a soaring glass ceiling. So when I learned that an effort was being made to save Pennsylvania Station from being demolished, I offered my help.
I really hadn't remembered much of this until recently, when I was contacted about this commemorative event, where I went down to a storage closet in the building I live in, in Washington, D.C., and went through some old files -- files that followed me from place to place. Looking through these files, I, sure enough, came upon a file marked AGBANY. I looked through it, and I found letters and other documents concerning the effort by AGBANY to save Penn Station. I've given those documents to the New York Preservation Archive Project.
One of the things I did was help draft a complaint to the Public Service Commission, demanding a hearing on the proposed demolition of Pennsylvania Station. Also, as an attorney for AGBANY, I wrote a brief to the City Planning Commission, in opposition to the granting of a special permit for an arena of 25,000 seats, on the site of Pennsylvania Station. (That would be the new Madison Square Garden.) The Public Service Commission responded to the complaint in a letter which stated that "to the extent the complaint was prompted by aesthetic considerations, which, given AGBANY's title -- Action Group for Better Architecture in New York -- the commission assumed there was a personal motivation for the complaint.
The Public Service Commission concluded that "because the motivation of the complaint was an aesthetic complaint," the commission had no power to act in the matter. The letter went on to say that "while the commission, of course, was concerned with the adequacy of the service to be rendered to the traveling public, in the absence of some substantial reduction in such service, the proposal to demolish Pennsylvania Station did not require the commission's prior approval."
In other words, the Public Service Commission was of the view that the demolition of a public edifice that gave dignity to travelers, elevated their spirit, and enhanced their departures and arrivals, did not constitute a substantial reduction in the adequacy of the service rendered to the traveling public.
That was the attitude at that time. That was the attitude of people in the various bureaucracies, and, to a large extent, a large part of the government. The point of the brief I submitted to the City Planning Commission was that, in determining whether land which the Pennsylvania Railroad had been empowered to acquire solely for railroad purposes -- including 32nd Street -- whether that land could, some sixty years later, be used for non-railroad purposes -- as the site for an indoor sports arena -- the commission was required to consider and weigh every public interest in the continuance of the then current use and form of the site; that is, as Pennsylvania Station.
When I think about these events now, some forty years later, I think it's clear to me -- as I think it's clear to most people -- that the destruction of Pennsylvania Station demonstrated that the then-existing law was inadequate to protect the public interest in an edifice that had been dedicated to a public purpose, and had enhanced the lives of those who had used it. The demolition of Pennsylvania Station gave rise to an organized and sustained public effort to preserve historical landmarks, and to the passage of the Landmarks Preservation Law.
Pennsylvania Station was destroyed; Grand Central Station was saved. Pennsylvania Station, a building whose like we will not see again, had to be sacrificed for people to become aware of the significance to their lives of our great buildings and public spaces.

AR: Mr. Judd, thank you very, very much for your most sensitive and informative remarks.

SJ: Thank you, very much.