East Coast Travelogue №3: Moynihan Train Hall as a Portrait of Inequality and Cuomo’s Dark Legacy

That corrupt sex pest had a penchant for making things shiny without improving their functionality for the people who actually use it daily. Nothing exemplifies both Cuomo’s disturbing legacy and the rampant wealth disparity that defines 2020s NYC quite like Moynihan Train Hall.

Previously, on Episode 2 of the Return to the East Coast Travelogue, I spent the week in Raleigh for a game dev conference and was taken aback at how much it had changed under what looked like colonization from northeasterners.

This time, the journey to the next stop had a couple legs and didn’t stop at the airport.

Originally, it was supposed to terminate at Newark Airport. But while Newark isn’t as miserable of an experience as LAX (except that stupid AirTrain design, making them like Ferris wheel cars — people got luggage!), the Jewish wedding principle struck and my plans got derailed.

I was supposed to have a quick ride in and out of my hometown’s odd half-sibling across the Hudson, then a free crashpad with my parents for the night before I hopped the train to upstate New York to visit friends. But my parents were on vacation, caught COVID, and had to quarantine until they were cleared to return to the US. I looked into rerouting my flight to Albany, but the change fee was astronomical. So I changed the date on my train ticket instead.

This wound up being a blessing in disguise since it gave me more time with my friends and I had enough Best Western points to get another night for free anyhow. Moreover, it’s because I got an unexpected little adventure: finally getting to see Moynihan Train Hall.

It left me feeling emotional, but probably not for the reasons you’d think.

Whether it was business trips, late night punk shows on Long Island, or visiting friends, family, and lovers across the tristate area, Penn Station was a regular part of my old lives.

Having just emerged from the dilapidated sardine can otherwise known as New Jersey Transit, it took me a minute to adjust because this vestibule seemed less grimy than I remembered.

NJ Transit is still relegated to Penn Station. Only Amtrak and Long Island Railroad (LIRR) trains use Moynihan Train Hall. I remember hearing a lot about this project in my final years in the city, but I didn’t get to see it when it opened. I wasn’t taking any trains and had no reason to be in the Penn Station area, and this was when I was still severely limiting travel.

But now that I was armored with N95s and three jabs with 90 minutes to kill before my Empire State Amtrak took off for Albany, I decided that now was a good time to check out as much of the new train hall as I could handle while corralling two suitcases.

I was taken aback at how overly clean and shiny it was. It not only felt completely unnatural to see a building in this neighborhood this clean, but also this UNINHABITED. Penn Station and environs were packed like my overstuffed suitcase, this structure felt like some strange diversion like time-leaping in Steins;Gate.

Sunlight poured through the crystalline roof. Futuristic yet retro-looking signposts indicated the track numbers and the boards were even larger and easier to read than that classic “Big Board” with all the LIRR departures. The floors shone so hard, you could practically shoot a make-up tutorial video using them. Gray, silver, and gold everywhere as if the whole thing was Great Gatsby themed.

The shops visible from my vantage point were definitely higher-end than what I’d seen in Penn Station all my life. Here, one of those $20 salad joints was juxtaposed to a Starbucks keeping travelers and train crews caffeinated. A Magnolia Bakery vending cupcakes and their famous banana pudding was doing steady business.

Whereas like Port Authority, Penn Station always had more pedestrian offerings like a pizza joint, some delis, McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, and newsstands. There was also Traxx bar and grill, where people often went to wile away a few hours before that final “drunk train” on the Ronkonkoma Line.

The hosiery shop by the NJ Transit terminal carried both cheap fishnets and luxury brands like Gerbe and Wolford. They knew their clientele consisted of broke alternative kids en route to CBGB’s and Batcave, and rich older woman lawyers from Short Hills who left their tights at their paramours’ offices.

While a Walgreens offered the necessities of daily life on the opposite end of the concourse, I imagine only Wolford caliber tights would be stocked in a place like this in due time.

Then I was taken aback at the complete lack of seating.

This is a pressing disability justice issue: there is literally nowhere to sit. As someone who’s had multiple foot surgeries and still has connective tissue problems stemming from them, I can’t help but notice these things.

It feels like this complete inaccessibility was done by design. Anti-homeless architecture makes cruelty the point. These people don’t care if you’re elderly, pregnant, or disabled (invisibly or visibly). Seating apparently disrupts this unnaturally clean and shiny mausoleum.

All of my basic biological needs were kicking in to find food, a bathroom, and a place to rest with this luggage after a bumpy ride into the NJ Transit terminal. I could’ve checked out the food hall, but I didn’t do that since I was meeting my friend for dinner but wanted something small to tide me over.

Then I realized I had a wild card in my backpack that had been sitting there for months in true adventure game fashion: a free lounge pass to any Amtrak lounge.

Amtrak is more for adventure rather than practicality in my new home in Los Angeles, unless I need to go to San Diego for conventions. Ergo, I still maintain my Amtrak MasterCard. But when I opened the card during the pandemic, they sent me a shitload of lounge and companion passes. Now was my chance to use one! And I heard this lounge was one of the best in the nation, to the point that all the hype leading to the train hall’s opening would spend a paragraph or two on the Metropolitan Lounge. This seemed like a good time to use that pass.

After a long escalator ride and being asked to give my name and show my ticket along with the pass, I was granted entry to the Metropolitan Lounge.

I’ll be real with you: it’s a little breathtaking. This lounge will knock you off your feet if you’re not used to these settings.

I’m a platinum Delta cardholder and one of the perks is lounge access. I’ll say from experience that the lounge at JFK is bigger and nicer than the one at LAX, but both are posh as hell if you’re not used to frequent business travel.

This train lounge though? DAAAAAMN.

Unlike the dearth of seats on the concourse, the Metropolitan Lounge was a veritable wealth of seating: there were overstuffed high-back chairs. Low-back chairs! Booths! Standard restaurant-style chairs!

It was like Crazy Eddie in the old days, but for chairs instead of electronics and accounting fraud!

As a lifelong New Yorker, what will really take you aback is all that space.

I talked a little about this in the last travelogue entry, how we’re used to simply having less space compared to people in other cities. That it blew my mind to see someone on the 16 bus sit on the outside part of the seat and not move inward when it got crowded, and no one said anything to this person. You’d get reamed out for not moving or putting your bag on the seat back east.

Seeing this massive abundance of walking space and comfortable seating was a little jarring, to say the least. Not to mention line-free bathrooms where you can just leave your stuff on a table outside instead of smashing an SUV-sized suitcase into the stall with you!

Now imagine my shock when I perused my options for a quick bite and they tell me that it’s complimentary.

Still put some cash in the tip jar, though. Nowhere are you paying $2 for a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of hot tea, unless it’s a corner of The Bronx still in 1991.

I even lamented that I couldn’t get into the city earlier, had I known this is where the adventure would take me — something I hadn’t planned at all. I was just hoping my flight wouldn’t get delayed and I could make that 4:40 train to Albany without incident. There were so many seats with outlets, where you could charge your phone to your heart’s content and get your work done from the road in peace and comfort.

I didn’t have time to set up my laptop and get to work. But as if this unfathomable comfort in one of the most cramped and stressful parts of town wasn’t enough, there was something exemplified what the city became, and who the people in charge really serve.

At first blush, this looks like ordinary restaurant seating. Not as comfortable as the chairs inside, but you open these glass doors and get to watch people come and go from the concourse.

Now look, I’m all for people-watching. It’s what us creatives do.

But look at how this is structured: the balcony in the Metropolitan lounge, where we enjoyed free refreshments and don’t have to wait in lines rivaling those for COVID testing to use the bathroom, literally LOOKS DOWN UPON everyone below. Where people who have nowhere to freaking sit and have to cough up $30 for a minuscule burger at the food hall if they don’t want to risk missing their train.

This is not an equal opportunity balcony. You either need a lot of money to get into this lounge (you ever seen how much sleeper car tickets cost?) or the stupid luck that I had, where I happened to have a freebie from my card issuer and it laid neglected in my backpack for months.

This is not what train travel should look like.

It should be prioritized, spacious, welcoming, and affordable for all like how it is in other countries. Where skipping the miserable aspects — which are also discriminatory to disabled, elderly, and pregnant people — isn’t only for those who have the means. (Likely because they’d be minimized by design first, like the incredible train travel I had in Japan.)

Where train station shops and dining can be destinations, but also have plenty of pedestrian options since not EVERY frigging thing under the sun has to be some curated gastropub experience.

The reality of Moynihan Train Hall is that while it’s very pretty and shiny, you’re SOL if you need a place to sit and can’t access the lounge upstairs, or aren’t paying for a marked up meal in the food hall. You have to go that shitty old waiting room in Penn Station across the street with those irksome diagonal-back chairs and all the moths having an orgy in the fluorescent lights. Or brave the elements on those steps outside.

Standing on that balcony made me realize this glittering structure with limited functionality is symbolic of what’s happening with the rest of the city. That Hudson Yards eyesore is for Dubai expats who own six glass condos they don’t live in while Mayor Robocop is committing even more brutality towards the homeless and the poor than Giuliani did when he tried to turn 42nd Street into a gaudy parody of Disney World.

I’ve talked a great deal about all of the metaphorical death of the old New York. But this gaudily domineering nouveau New York carries an actual bloodstained legacy.

Architectural project manager Michael Evans was in charge of overseeing the decade-long Moynihan Train Hall project. His husband alleges that the ever-increasing crescendo of demands from the Cuomo administration caused Evans to take his own life barely a year before the long-awaited Penn Station extension opened to the public.

He was so overworked, that this project that was once an enthralling challenge became his life’s focal point and an entrapment.

I don’t want to dishonor Mr. Evans’ memory and completely disparage the train hall. Renovating such a colossal building of that age in a pandemic while the rest of my homeland’s infrastructure rots? That’s no small feat.

But knowing that gropey failson whose infinite graft made life miserable for New Yorkers instructed his lackeys to just overwork this poor man to literal death so he’d look good on TV for beating an arbitrary deadline? It just makes the sinister layers beneath all that marble even colder before running down your spine.

Cuomo’s infamous graft with Hudson Yards has an equally bloodstained legacy, another monument to runaway inequality that now exceeds what my great-grandparents experienced in the Gilded Age in this very city.

While Evans was proud of his work and had a deep love of this city, knowing that these people overworked and bullied him to the point that he ended his life before he could see the results is heartbreaking, to say the least.

Corrupt leadership in this city and state date back centuries. But knowing the full extent of it, and what happened for this project to see the light of day while the actual train tracks beneath this hall continue to rot thanks to Cuomo’s neglect over the years? It definitely made it harder to enjoy the comfort of the Metropolitan Lounge while waiting for my train to the capitol region.

Moynihan Train Hall is pretty and shiny, but it’s meant to wow visitors rather than provide a functional transit hub for commuters and residents.

Particularly visitors with means, as that lounge was pretty swanky.

This wasn’t a project for public good to make life better for a majority of the people who live and work in this city, even if it helped ease some congestion at Penn Station. It was an attempt to make Cuomo look like an effective leader, then his blatant corruption and insatiable appetite for harassing women undid him anyway.

Knowing both the tragic story behind the people who made the train hall possible and just plain seeing what my homeland turned into made it hard for me to get excited about its existence. It all feels like a vulgar display of wealth to further taunt the people who depend on train travel, and can barely afford to live and/or work in this very place anymore.

But when I eventually come back to see my family and the friends still scattered in this region, I’m happy to use that lounge pass for a free bagel and Wi-Fi. When the world gives you a free bagel, take it.

Next Travelogue Entry: The Proud Foundry Along the Hudson