Waiting for Peter Pan
an appreciation and history of Port authority bus terminal in new york city
by Jordan Hruska with photographs by Eric Petschek
originally published in August Journal in December 2017
Within the first five hours of its opening day on December 14, 1950, the Port Authority Bus Terminal welcomed an estimated 40,000 people. A New York Times article on the inaugural day featured a woman who proclaimed, amid a swarm of people in the terminal, as she pointed to an unremarkable location on the similarly ordinary, gray terrazzo floor near a circular information booth: “I used to live in this spot.” As a member of one of the 599 families that were displaced to make way for the $24 million public project, she articulated a sense of dislocation that the building would come to represent—a quality that, over the years, has generated uneasiness among many city residents who consider the terminal, which was renovated and expanded in 1981, to be one of the most abysmal buildings in New York City.
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia initially conceived of the Port Authority Bus Terminal as a “union terminal” that would address the problem of crippling traffic by centralizing buses that had accessed disparate depots scattered around Manhattan’s west side. After much debate, the City decided to locate the terminal within an entire square block bound from 40th to 41st streets and from Eighth to Ninth Avenues. Vehicular traffic on 42nd Street increased when the Lincoln Tunnel opened in 1937, expanding to include a second tube in 1945. A place of transience, this area of the city today connects Midtown Manhattan to all points west across America. On-ramps and off-ramps swoop upward in giant arcs over the horizon and cut below grade in cavernous underpasses to connect, at various points, the city’s grid to the tunnel’s two tubes. Ferries arrive and depart at a terminal just down 39th Street and cars careen up and down the West Side Highway. Everything is tenuously linked, yet seemingly held together by sheer inertia, the speed and agency with which people and cars and busses and boats move.
Over the past seven decades, the Port Authority Bus Terminal has insinuated itself into this infrastructural snarl and was eventually overtaken by it. Little evidence of the original 1950 building, designed by Walter McQuade, chief architect of the Port Authority’s engineering department, can be seen today from its exterior. The Art Deco–style structure rose four stories and incorporated some 2.5 million bricks. It declared itself on Eighth Avenue with a three-tiered facade, set back from the street in a curvilinear radial turn that not only referenced the action of the busses turning around inside of its garage, but also echoed the blunt shape of the bows of ships docked along the nearby piers of the Hudson River. A 1981 renovation and expansion of the terminal obscured these details with multi-story trusses carried on steel columns and placed along the building’s outer edges, which extended the footprint of the structure’s upper garage decks to ease bus congestion and overcrowding. The resulting form, seen from the street, is hardly a form at all. It’s identified by the incremental repetition of these X-shaped trusses, retrofitted in a hulking scaffold that suggests that the terminal is perpetually under construction, inspiring a feeling of instability only furthered by its seedy 1970s and ’80s reputation as an epicenter for petty crimes, runaway teens, assault, and the occasional flash from a prostitute.
In 1976, the non-profit 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation formed to re-imagine a new future for West 42nd Street, which, by the late 1950s and early ’60s had become the thoroughfare of loitering and sex trade. The Terminal’s 1981 renovation and expansion, designed by staff architects from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, intended to catalyze the redevelopment of this area—a perennial pursuit that had generated unrealized, utopian master plans from developers and city agencies since the 1950s. In a 1977 New York Times article on the renovation and expansion, the manager of planning for the Port Authority asked, in reference to the open parking lot that provided land for the expansion: “If it weren’t for the terminal can you imagine what the area would be?” His rhetorical question was a nod to the risks of open space in this part of town, a hotbed of vice and crime that earned its nickname, “The Deuce” (short for “Forty-Deuce” or 42nd Street). Yet, it could be argued that the imposing design for the Terminal expansion only reinforced its reputation for this illicit activity. Many late-modernist megaprojects realized in New York during this era sought to increase the tax base by attracting new residents and businesses in outsize scale “superblock” developments that unsympathetically consumed entire stretches of city blocks. Oppressive aesthetic choices, much like the Terminal’s aggressively large, X-shaped trusses, broadcast these projects’ imposing relationship to the neighborhood and provided little reciprocity with city residents and commuters at a human scale. Alternatively, incremental redevelopment initiatives in this part of town proved more successful. This methodology was demonstrated just a block away from the Terminal at “Theater Row,” a mix of rehabilitated historic theaters and new Off-Broadway venues that was supported by the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation in 1978 and credited with jumpstarting the area’s re-imagination.
Today, the terminal possesses little of the self-assuredness marking Grand Central or, despite its baroque pompousness, the more recently completed Oculus at the World Trade Center. The mark of a successful transit center in New York, it could be argued, is just that—it’s a center: a collection point that allows travelers to gather and orient themselves as they leave or enter the city. The Port Authority Bus Terminal thrives instead on facilitating the determined trajectories of commuters who know exactly where they’re going, without any guidance or mediation of a grand hall or central collection point. Its wayfinding successfully directs visitors to bus gates, but they would be hard-pressed to learn where the busses at those gates are traveling before they arrive at the gates themselves. The terminal privileges the daily commuter’s intuition, leaving all other types of visitors lost.
Mahwah. Perth Amboy. Avenel. Secaucus Cul-de-Sac. Mount Ivy. Just like the terminal itself, these suburbs occupy a peripheral position in relation to New York City, but conversely represent the centers of life for many commuters. They signal the final destination: home. Travelers eagerly access busses via a tacit knowledge developed from repeating their daily commute—over, and again—getting better and more adept at finding the quickest route through this purgatory from their office to the bus gate. The terminal’s porous design reveals its esoteric shortcuts only to the most observant. Certain escalators skip floors. Secret little stairways, barely wide enough for two, wend their way from floor two to floor three, allowing one to bypass crowded escalators altogether. It’s a commute of chutes and ladders.
Brick tile of various colors striate and codify the building’s different levels, offering a geologic point of orientation for the uninitiated. The orange and yellow brick walls on the basement level signify the interstate bus concourse; white tile decks the gates on the second floor. You’re on floors three or four if you see red. Brown tile extends throughout the entire building, sneaking up columns and pooling underneath the decorative faux-brass eaves that hang from the ceiling in concentric formations above escalator banks and waiting areas. Massive diagrid rafters span the ceilings in some of the terminal’s double-height spaces, echoing the building’s X-shaped trusses and nesting a system of lighting (along with long-lost helium balloons gone astray).
A closer look above yields a surprising discovery: hidden ceiling speakers bleating the twinkling orchestral works of Ravel and other Classical masters. At first, the music forms a discordant soundtrack to the unapologetic spectacle of public life inside the terminal—a mother screams at her child; a man in a stained, wrinkled skirt and floppy chef hat twirls around with his hands up in the air while singing hymnals; a woman reclines in a chair, ready to have her eyebrows threaded at a kiosk; a pigeon bathes in a drinking fountain. Dozens of people rush by as the impressionistic Classical soundtrack of the French composer plays on. Slowly, the music syncs with these smaller, more spontaneous moments, elevating them to an absurd sublime. In the terminal’s garage, within walls calcified with exhaust soot and grime, commuters stare out from little glass vitrine waiting rooms smudged with fingerprints that catch the slicing pink sky as the sun sets across the Hudson. The Port Authority Bus Terminal is a chaotic microcosm of the city as symphony, its vast disorder matched only by the city it serves.
