Let Penn Station live: Why I celebrate NYCs ugly, overcrowded and dysfunctional labyrinth

This might make me the most ridiculed man in New York City.I’m here to celebrate Penn Station — not the original one demolished in the 1960s, and not futuristic “visions” that won’t ever be built.

I mean the one that exists today in all its supposedly ugly, overcrowded and dysfunctional state.It’s almost perverse for a New Yorker to say he or she doesn’t hate Penn Station.So ingrained in our local psyche is the perception of it as a labyrinth of squalor, saying that one likes it is tantamount to expressing glee that the Dodgers and Giants moved to California.But I’ll take the heat for arguing  that the sprawling, underground complex, which now stretches from Seventh to Ninth Avenue, is much, much better for catching trains or passing through than it was even a dozen years ago, and parts of it are absolute joys.Penn Station is not, and never will be, a West Side version of Grand Central Terminal.But we don’t need to dig up a dozen city blocks and tear down a bunch of buildings to make way for a whole new Penn Station, as Gov.

Hochul says she desires.We don’t need to move Madison Square Garden, which sits on top of it — a pipedream of Dolan family-hating politicians, the Municipal Art Society, the Regional Plan Association and architects by the score.They hope to evoke the grandeur, if not to replicate, the great masterpiece that was the original Penn Station, taken from us 60 years ago.Over the past 10 years, improvements both monumental (Moynihan Train Hall) and incremental (lots of new and improved street entrances) by Vornado Realty Trust, the MTA, Amtrak, the LIRR and  New Jersey Transit have made the sprawling complex more attractive and navigable than it’s ever been.Architectural historian Vincent Scully famously wrote that the original Penn Station’s replacement was cheap and graceless underground warren: “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”Neither heavenly beings nor vermin are evident these days...