5. Penn Station Remnant at Brooklyn Museum

During the demolition of the original Penn Station, many enormous granite pieces from the station were simply dumped into the New Jersey Meadowlands and other places. The twenty-two eagles, sculpted by Adolph A. Weinman, that flanked the four “Day and Night” clocks were sent to new homes throughout the country, with two remaining at the current station. The clocks, which were located above each of the station’s four entrances, were less lucky – two were lost in the Meadowlands, one was sent to an Eagle Scout Memorial in Kansas City, and half of one was found in a Bronx recycling depot in the 1990s.

Fortunately for posterity, the Brooklyn Museum has two remnants of the original Penn Station: the “Night” half of a “Day and Night” sculpture, standing eleven feet tall, and a partial marble column from the waiting hall displayed in the Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden. The artifacts were recovered thanks to the efforts of the Anonymous Arts Recovery Society (AARS), a group of New York City creatives, led by influential New York gallery owner Ivan Karp. During the height of New York City’s urban renewal, the Society was dedicated to salvaging the remnants of historical nineteenth-century architecture.

Join us on an upcoming tour of the Remnants of Penn Station, where we track down dozens of remnants of the original station still inside and around the current station.

You can get an autographed copy directly from Untapped Cities shipped to you or picked up from our Brooklyn office or a non-autographed copy on Amazon.