All Aboard?

Boarding the train  back to Washington last Saturday, I found myself in the new Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall. It's an imposing place, artfully done with glass ceilings that frame original stone walls. 

The space created for this new building was at one point suggested by the former senator from New York, and as a New Yorker article about it points out, the new terminal seeks to atone for the travesty that was the teardown of the original Penn Station in 1963. 

The train hall is glossy and spit-polished and features huge screens with rotating displays, including photographs of 1940s travelers, women in frocks with sleeves down to their elbows, a generous if  not always flattering cut, I thought, as I waited for the train in my cap-sleeved dress. 

That I spent as much time as I did musing on those passengers and those dresses is proof that there was little else to look at. 

So, with apologies for acting the curmudgeon, let me grieve for a moment the loss of the Amtrak boarding area in the previous Penn Station, the one that replaced the"Beaux Arts beauty" of the original, the Penn Station of more recent yore, where the chaos of waiting for a train was the city's final gift to the departing traveler. A reminder of the chaos you were leaving behind, the chaos that you would miss when you returned home.

A Building is Born

This morning on my way to work I didn't have to cross the street and cross it again a block later. I didn't have to walk around a construction site. It seems that finally, finally, the new building is finished.

I've watched it fall and rise again, gutted, framed and windowed. The old building was indistinguishable from its brothers, another stone box. This new version is mostly glass, it seems. Shiny and bright, but I'm wondering how it will hold up.

No matter, though. I'm just relieved that my path here is not impeded, that cranes don't swing across the sky, that First Street no longer narrows to one lane.

It happens all the time, I know, but usually not so close to home. And when it does, it's worth mentioning: A building is born.

State House Dome

On Monday, a rainy afternoon gave way to a clear evening, and a walk along Annapolis's main street after dark gave us this view.

It's the Maryland State House dome. Completed in 1794, it's "the oldest and largest wooden dome of its kind in the United States," a fact sheet tells me.

But on that early summer night, as it shone between the other, darkened buildings, it was a thing of beauty most of all.