When the train hall at Penn Station was renovated and reopened in 2021, this vast public space returned with one glaring omission: a complete lack of public seating. The only place to sit down is all the way in the back of the train hall, in the ticketed waiting area. Why aren’t there seats in the obvious place where you would expect it, out in the open near the train platforms, as is the case at most train halls such as Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station? The only explanation for this hostile design is an attempt to remove unhoused people from public space in the name of aesthetics and the broken logic of broken windows policing. This hostile choice is not only the wrong choice because this is a pointless and cruel goal, it is also the wrong choice because it makes the train hall inaccessible to anyone, ticketed traveler or not, who might need to sit down while traversing this massive space. Disabled, elderly, pregnant, or just if you’re just tired: Moynihan Train Hall makes no attempt to accommodate you. This cruel goal and its inaccessible implications reveal how Moynihan Train Hall does not exist to actually function as a useful transportation hub for traveling without a car, but rather to create the illusion of a "world-class transportation hub" in a "world-class city"—the former is just a happy side affect.
The lack of benches in Moynihan Train Hall is deliberately hostile to people who are unhoused. Hostile architecture is, sadly, extremely common in our modern world. Many designs are employed in public space to prevent laying down or sleeping, such as middle armrests on benches, spikes installed on otherwise flat surfaces, or loud annoying music playing 24/7. Rather than even trying to addressing the root causes of why there are thousands of people without housing who need a place to lie down in public, these designs instead push the most vulnerable people in our society further into the margins just to create the illusion for everyone else that our society isn’t utterly broken—to obscure the fact that we live in world where profit and property are valued so much higher than human life and wellbeing. The lack of benches in the Moynihan Train Hall—and the accompanying police officers who patrol the space preventing anyone from sitting on the ground—fit squarely into this well established paradigm of hostile design as a bold faced attempt to design unhoused people out of view and out of mind.
Beyond being a means to a cruel and pointless end, the lack of benches in Moynihan Train Hall makes train travel inaccessible to too many people. There are many reasons why someone might need to sit down while traversing a space as vast the Moynihan Train Hall, such as having a disability, being elderly, pregnant, or just tired. The ticketed waiting area tucked away in the back of the train hall does not accomplish this necessary function because it is too far from many of the train platforms, and all the entrances. Moreover, this area doesn’t even have enough seating to accommodate the number of passengers in the station when it’s busy. Everyone deserves access to the train, and to be accommodated to their needs while doing so. However, the lack of benches in Moynihan Train Hall, the busiest train hall in North America, denies this option to too many and creates unnecessary challenges for too many others! If you need to be able to take a break from standing while traversing the huge space inside Moynihan Train Hall for any reason, New York City says: tough luck.
Did not a single person involved in this decision have a parent or grandparent older than themselves who they want to be able to take the train? This cruel decision to use a hostile and consequently inaccessible design revels the answer to be: apparently not! The true purpose of the Moynihan Tran Hall is exposed to be clout for New York City on the world stage rather than a functioning train hall for everyone.
In an age of growing awareness of the negative impacts driving has on the local and global environments and on personal wellbeing, train travel is getting more desirable for many people. Looking to other countries around the world with well functioning high speed rail systems for regional and long distance travel, New York City leaders know that a functioning system for train travel is a becoming bon a fide requirement to be considered a "serious city" by urbanists and travelers, who’s validation they crave as a stamp of approval for clout on the world stage and for continued international investment. However, the reason trains are popular is because they are actually good for the people who use them—and it is good for the world when people use them instead of driving—not because they look nice on a sheet of statistics.
We cannot accept a train hall built for clout, that creates a high barrier for many travelers to use the train. We cannot accept a cruel design to remove people who are unhoused from view while we live in a world with ever rising inequality and housing costs fueled by the corporate greed inherent to our capitalist system this clout is built to cater to, which treats housing as a commodity to exploit for profit just like everything else. If you don’t want to see any unhoused people in your train hall: work on providing housing to all who need it, rather pushing those who don’t have it onto the street and further into the margins of society. We cannot accept this design for public space that creates problems just to prop up the illusion of no problems; we have problems, and the Moynihan Train Hall is contributing to them. Fuck the Moynihan Train Hall!
References
Callous Objects: Designs against the Homeless. University of Minnesota Press. Robert Rosenberger, 2017.
https://blog.amtrak.com/2017/05/look-history-behind-nations-busiest-rail-hub/