Proposed Train Hall
On June 17, 2025, Politico published an extensive news article, “The MAGA-Backed Plan to Make Penn Station Beautiful Again.” The piece begins:
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In 2021, Justin Shubow, the president of the non-profit National Civic Art Society, approached a team of supporters with a starry-eyed vision: Renovate New York City’s Penn Station according to a grand neoclassical design. Shubow knew that the idea was a long shot. Generations of architects and urban planners had tried and failed to renovate the transit hub, whose maze of narrow corridors and dimly lit concourses regularly invites comparisons to a subterranean rats’ net.
But Shubow, a Columbia University-educated architectural critic with round-rimmed glasses and a carefully manicured goatee, thought it was important to try. During the first Trump administration, he had championed the revival of classical architecture as the chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, and he wanted to bring the same aesthetic principles to bear on a new Penn Station — not just for the sake of the city’s harried commuters, but as a statement about the resurgent greatness of America in the Trump era.
“Classical architecture is the architecture of American democracy,” said Shubow, noting that the original Penn Station, with its imposing doric columns and soaring marble archways, was an exemplary model of classical design before it was demolished in 1963. “It is the architecture of civic virtue.
Shubow’s pitch found a receptive audience among his allies on the MAGA right. Tom Klingenstein, the Republican mega-donor and chair of the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, quickly signed on as a chief financial backer. Over the next three years, a team led by the classical architect Alexandros Washburn spent hundreds of hours and over $3 million designing a plan — dubbed “Grand Penn” — to replace the existing station with a palatial new complex, complete with a glass-enclosed train hall, a 600,000-square-foot concourse, a public park and a new classical façade modeled on the pre-1963 station. On paper, the planers claim, the renovation would cost somewhere in the ballpark of $7.5 billion and could be completed by 2036.
But by the time the plan for Grand Penn plan was completed in late 2024, it was only lacking one thing: political muscle. Amid intractable fighting between the various city, state and federal authorities that claimed justification over station, Grand Penn remained little more than a blueprint on a shelf.
Then Donald Trump reentered the White House.
In April, Trump announced that his Department of Transportation would taking over a possible Penn Station renovation, wresting oversight of the project from embattled city and state authorities. The administration’s abrupt intervention was an extraordinary stroke of good luck for the team behind Grand Penn. Practically overnight, their plan for a classically inspired station went from a far-fetched conservative pipe dream to a real possibility. Although Trump’s Department of Transportation has not formally endorsed the plan, the plan’s architects have met with senior officials from DOT and the Federal Railroad Administration in recent months, and discussions between the two groups are ongoing, according to multiple people with knowledge of the discussions. (A spokesperson for DOT confirmed that FRA officials have met with the Grand Penn team, among other design firms.) In recent weeks, Trump has personally contacted Grand Penn’s backers to express interest in their design, said a person familiar with the situation who was granted anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.
“It seems that the stars might be aligning,” said Shubow, sounding a note of cautious optimism. . . .
Yet for the team behind the Grand Penn plan, the stakes of the battle go far beyond the station itself. In their eyes, a classical renovation of Penn Station could mark the first step in a broader aesthetic revolution — or, better yet, a counter-revolution — that would usher in a new wave of classical architecture befitting of Trump’s promised “golden age” in America. . . .
“Classical architecture is the philosophical manifestation of the theoretical founding of our regime,” said Klingenstein, a hedge-fund manager who donated over $10 million to Republican campaigns and causes in the latest election cycle. “The theory goes back to Rome and Greece. This is their — and, by adoption, our — architecture.”
Or, as Shubow has more succinctly put it, it’s time to “Make American Beautiful Again.” . . .
[D]uring his tenure in Washington, Trump has demonstrated at least some support for the architectural principles of ancient Athens and Rome. Toward the end of his first term in 2020, the president issued an executive order — supported by Shubow’s Commission of Fine Arts — directing the General Services Administration to defer to classical architectural aesthetics when designing new federal buildings. After the order was rescinded by the Biden administration, Trump issued a new presidential memo this past January reiterating the directive. . . .
“Building a fantastic new Penn Station with classical architecture would make a statement about American civilization in the same way that the rebuilding of Notre Dame in Paris said something about French civilization,” said Shubow, recalling Trump’s visit to the newly rebuilt gothic cathedral last December. “This project is so important that this could be one of the president’s biggest legacies.” . . .
In a statement, the [Trump] administration echoed Grand Penn’s grandiose ambitions: “Once-iconic gems of America’s infrastructure like New York’s Penn Station cannot continue to languish under incompetent leadership,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “Restoring and revitalizing America’s infrastructure is a key priority for the Trump administration as part of our mandate to restore American Greatness.”
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Read the full article at Politico.