What was its “former self?”
When you got off of the train at Penn station, it felt like there was an electric current running through the streets: everyone had a hustle, had a place they had to get to right now. It was dirty, loud, and would soon become the most dangerous first-world city. And it was, after the ravages of WWII, the center of the economic universe.
The day they tore Penn station down, was the day the the knife was plunged into the Big Apple's heart.