| How the effort to renovate midtown Manhattan’s transit hub has been stalled by money, politics, and disputes about the public good.  Illustration by Valentin Tkach The dismal state of Pennsylvania Station provokes expressive description. The governor of New York has called it a “hellhole.” Her predecessor referred to the station’s passengers as being reduced to scuttling rats. The place has become a sad and neglected, yet extremely busy‚ basement—a “shabby, haunted labyrinth” full of “cramped passages with no signs, wires spilling from missing ceiling panels,” as William Finnegan writes in his sweeping investigation of the economic, political, and interpersonal hurdles that are standing between the city and a safer, more efficient, and less embarrassing train station. There’s plenty of villainy and intransigence to go around, but at the center of the story is James Dolan, the billionaire owner of Madison Square Garden, an aging structure that rests atop Penn Station and serves as a gigantic concrete obstacle in any designs for a transit-hub overhaul. Finnegan confronts a maddening question: “Do we really have to find a prime plot in midtown that’s acceptable to James Dolan, buy it, and build him a new Garden before we can get serious about fixing Penn Station?” Help shape the future of the New Yorker app. Take a brief survey » | 
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