Palimpsest

Photo By E. Vitka on Unsplash

Deep in the bowels of Penn Station, past the gum-caked sidewalks of Seventh Avenue and the ceiling vents gasping for breath and the sorriest Jamba Juice in all of New York City, stands a staircase with an iron railing. Brown tile walls encase it on either side, sodden with the tactless fluorescence of the platform below. For most, it is just a stepping stone to more important things—a family dinner in Hempstead, a long weekend in Montauk, a red-eye out of JFK. It raises no eyebrows.

I didn’t pick up on the staircase until I got lost. I was making my way from an Amtrak platform to the subway, plodding upstream against a human surge, when it appeared, subtle yet mysteriously out of character. The Penn Station I knew was an underground warren of cramped corridors compressed between nine-foot ceilings and gray vinyl flooring, its air so laden with stale pastries and fresh urine that it could inspire little more than a revival of the miasma theory. The staircase’s banister—a series of decorative iron X’s capped by ornamental fasteners and a curvaceous brass handrail—belied the 1970s economization that surrounded it. It was otherworldly, almost uplifting, at least for those of us who glanced.

The staircase leading down to Platforms 13 and 14 is a relic of the original Penn Station, a monumental structure that embodied ancient Rome’s best civic architecture and modern America’s penchant for grandiosity in equal measure. Completed in 1910 and demolished less than sixty years later, its soaring halls and towering colonnades survive today only in photographs and films—fragments from which we can begin to piece together the sights and sounds of an existence. In the opening credits of Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 thriller, Killer Kiss, sunlight from the old station’s vaulted glass roof douses a man as he paces on the platform, the echoes of a track announcement reverberating off the lofty travertine walls behind him. I was born at least thirty years too late to have my own memories of that space, but when I shuffle past the dusty Jamba Juice in Penn Station’s underbelly, I like to imagine myself there.

A tired cliché tells us that grief is love with no place to go, but I was never sure what to call those strange pangs of longing for things we never got to know in the first place.

I first met my dad in a video. He was standing in the rear of the frame, clutching the kitchen landline, placing an order for delivery from a folded paper menu—the kind that New York eateries used to tape to take-out containers before DoorDash or Yelp. He paused, cleared his throat, and muttered two words: “Soup, please.”

The video was recorded on a VHS in 1997, months after I learned to sit up and months before he learned he had cancer. It was a form that ravaged the tongue. He ended up spending half the overlap between our lives—sixteen months, to be exact—dying. First he lost what remained of his hair, then his ability to eat without intubation, then his tongue and his capacity for speech, and finally his life in May of 1999. Until my mom burned the home videos onto DVDs twelve years later, my only conception of him came from photographs.

I sat alone on the family room floor, digging my toes into timeworn tufts of carpet, watching and rewatching the footage not so much for its protagonists—toddler versions of me and my older sister—as for its fleeting images of the man in the background. I had always known on an intellectual level that he was English, but for reasons beyond explanation, it was not until I heard him order soup that it fully occurred to me that he had an accent to match. I suspect it was one of those details so innate to his being—or so obvious to anyone with deductive reasoning—that nobody ever thought to mention it outright.

Years later, as a sophomore in college, I started seeing a psychologist for the first time, mainly because I wanted to take Adderall but was too skittish to text a friend’s dealer. I ended up spending several Tuesday afternoons sitting in a faux-leather armchair in a dull office atop the student center, babbling about the ways I moved through the world—my pack rat proclivities, my unwillingness to let go of a boy who didn’t love me back, my contrived sense that I had to record all my grandma’s weekly phone calls and store the tenor of her voice somewhere safe. My therapist clicked her tongue sympathetically and traced it all back to a fear of loss rooted in the premature death of my dad. Trauma, it turns out, can bubble up from the distinct absence that follows death, not just from death itself. This was the kind of psychoanalysis that felt revelatory, almost too exact in what it unearthed about me, but maybe that’s what therapy was for. I never got the Adderall.

For rail hubs like Penn Station, modernization begets a slow death. In 1961, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, which had owned and operated New York’s monumental gateway for more than fifty years, was nearing financial ruin. The neoclassical masterpiece was impossible to maintain on a budget curtailed by the rise of commercial air travel and personal cars and America’s clinical obsession with suburbia. Plans were made to demolish everything except the subterranean platforms, cram the passenger concourses and waiting rooms underground, then build an office tower and a modern arena called Madison Square Garden on the land above. There was money to be made in Midtown Manhattan, and no commuter needed more than nine feet of headspace anyway.
It took a full three years to dismantle the original Penn Station, in large part because its tracks and platforms had to remain entirely operational for the duration of demolition and construction. Piece by piece, the elements by which we read architectural expression—columns, statues, pediments—were removed while the station’s vital organs—platforms and tracks—were maintained. Much of the building’s stone, some of it sourced from the same region of Italy that provided travertine for Rome’s storied monuments, was carted to landfills in New Jersey. I’ve seen photographs from this period, of passengers sitting on benches, encircled by luggage and the half-eaten archways of the old stone and steel colossus. They seem to be carrying on with their days, forced to accept that the barest functions of a body are enough to constitute life.

Demolition crews salvaged certain pieces of the old Penn Station, most famously the twenty-two eagle statues that adorned its facades, and scattered them like ashes. One is perched on the roof of the Cooper Union, the alma mater of their sculptor, while others rest at Valley Forge, on a bridge in Philadelphia, and in the granite quarry in Maine from which they were believed to have been culled. In the absence of the thing itself—the railroad station in its most ideal form—we are left to piece together snippets of its full being.

Korean families tend to lead opaque emotional lives. My mom, whose family immigrated to rural Wisconsin when she was in middle school, rarely talks about my dad, and so, in turn, I rarely ask. I wonder, at times, if this has more to do with invulnerability or pragmatism. We are either too allergic to the naked forms of affection required for such fragile conversations or too enticed by forward motion to dwell on what is already gone. In my effort to assemble some understanding of exactly what has been lost, our mutual obstinacy toward open discussions of death has left me to rely mostly on forensics.

Soon after my college graduation, I began searching for my dad’s life. I picked up a copy of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies from a used bookstore because the subtitle said A Biography of Cancer and there was a gold sticker on the cover. I was going to be someone who reads a tome on the subway, its spine cracked to page 482 as I fostered an intellectual yet empathetic conception of cell biology and the medical industry and human suffering. I got to page 61 before discovering the impracticality of subway tomes, and that I cared less in that moment about the ways cancer shaped the world than I did about the ways it shaped my dad’s.

When my mom downsized the following year, the move unsettled stacks of clutter decades in the making, and new sources emerged from the rubble. Sifting through a box in her new apartment, I unearthed a program from my dad’s memorial service and a notebook he kept at the beginning of his treatment. In the eulogies his friends wrote and the things he scrawled while standing on death’s doorstep, I found signs of our shared genealogy. When he started chemotherapy, he kept copious lists: things to eat, things to read, things to listen to. I do the same in my notebooks, though admittedly under less duress. He, like me, found as much comfort alone in a garden with a book as he did taking tequila shots in a dirty dive bar with friends. In a gap year between high school and college, he left his village in England and flew across the Atlantic to satisfy some inexplicable infatuation with the American South, tracing Faulkner’s novels and the life of Huey Long—Louisiana’s infamous governor—on Greyhound buses across the region. He did this just forty years before my own fascination with the books of Jesmyn Ward and Sarah M. Broom and Isabel Wilkerson unwittingly spurred me to take a parallel road trip as part of a postgraduate research grant and, eventually, to spend a summer living and working in Louisiana. There was evidence of my dark humor too. When a friend asked my dad during his final weeks of life whether he planned to read the enormous new Tom Wolfe novel, he quipped that he’d wait for the paperback.

In those moments, it was difficult not to fixate on the presumption that my dad and I were supposed to be close, that our beings might have converged with age in the same way my mom’s and my sister’s had—same stature, same mannerisms, same way of speaking, same outlooks on life. As I paced around the new apartment, unpacking and reshelving his old books on architecture and history and food, my mind drifted to some parallel plane where I was snickering through Death at a Funeral with him, or emailing him a draft of my asinine college term paper on bovine imagery in The Iliad, or blasting Van Morrison while he drove us to Faulkner’s house in Mississippi. I wondered what he would have thought about the way the world had unfolded, whether we might have bickered about my career path or Brexit or the contours of the Zaha Hadid building near the High Line. Whenever my birthday circled around, I half expected my mom to dive headfirst into her closet, fish out a sallow leather box, blow the dust off its lid, and reveal an ancient tape he’d wanted her to show me when I turned thirteen or eighteen or twenty-one. In the video, he’s speaking directly into the camera, philosophizing, bestowing upon me answers that paint a crisp path forward. The tape never surfaced, of course, and I was left with the vexing truth that someone taking soup orders in New York in 1997 had more conscious exposure to him than I ever would. I thought this entitled me to anger and loneliness, certain that I had been robbed of something, even if I could not articulate precisely what it was.

It turns out there is a word to describe nostalgia for a time you’ve never known: anemoia, coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in 2012. There is a connection, Koenig writes, between this peculiar brand of longing and pessimism—an unshakable dissatisfaction with the way things are. I knew anemoia on nights when my mom, my sister, and I had nothing to talk about over dinner, when I did schoolwork as the TV churned through family sitcoms in the background, allowing myself to pretend I was surrounded by all the charm and complexity and depth of a full family life. In my darkest moments, I caught myself speculating on how I might’ve evolved if my dad were the parent who had lived, whose influence had molded and deepened me. Would I, like him, love to cook? Would I have moved to far-off countries after college to teach English and collect art and read books in other languages, as he did? The pit of conjecture seemed bottomless. But as aptly as Koenig’s obscure sorrow captured my sentiment at the time, I soon realized that it was a futile way to process loss.

There is a page, buried deep in my dad’s chemotherapy notebook, with a message on emotion: “Resentment = unresolved anger. Anger is short-lived.” As it so happened, I was not the only one with pent-up frustrations about his early exit from the stage. But neither of us had anywhere in particular to direct our resentment or discontent, nor anyone to be angry at. The people in my orbit—mom, sister, grandma, uncles, aunts, family friends—were also people who lost someone important, people trying to stitch the world back together around themselves, around us. The patchwork that arose was quiet and forlorn and incomplete in places, but it was also alive and warm and altogether more real than anything in sitcoms or speculations.

The death of Penn Station is widely credited as the spark that launched the modern American preservation movement. In 1965, well before the dust of demolition had settled on Seventh Avenue, New York City passed the Landmarks Law, granting the recently formed Landmarks Preservation Commission legal authority to protect structures and spaces determined to be of substantial cultural import. The legislation, which went on to save Grand Central Terminal and innumerable other historic buildings from even the most eager wrecking balls, marked a shift in New York’s architectural psyche. Burned by an irrevocable loss of the highest conceivable order, this was no longer a city that equated all change with progress.

In 2015, when New York’s governor announced plans to renovate Penn Station into the gateway the city deserved, there were some who demanded that the original station simply be reconstructed. The exorbitant cost of Italian travertine in 2015 notwithstanding, such a move would have conceded that nothing short of resurrection is acceptable in the wake of loss. It would have denied that there is any value in the spaces and histories we have learned to fold into our scars. Like anemoia, preservationism in its most extreme form—the type that casts our buildings and cities in amber—is rooted in a skepticism about our ability to layer new life on top of the old, to create vessels as worthy of awe and care and romance as the last.

The state opted for more piecemeal changes instead. In 2021, the Farley Post Office Building across Eighth Avenue, which had been designed by the same architects as the original station, was reconceived as an airy, light-filled passenger terminal for Amtrak and the Long Island Railroad. In 2024, all of Thirty-Third Street was transformed into a pedestrian plaza with a subterranean retail complex. The hallways and concourses under Madison Square Garden are slated for renovation into more generous spaces for the 630,000 people who pass through the station each day.

As renovations continue, Penn Station has come to embody what architects call a palimpsest—a form that, even after a series of effacements and alterations, still bears traces of the original. In the placement of columns and tracks and the staircase between Platforms 13 and 14, there are vestiges of that old stone building in what came after it. And even as sparkling new concourses are added, I am surprised to find comfort in the familiar 1970s warrens that linger.

For eight years of my childhood, my mom reverse-commuted to central New Jersey—four hours of daily movement by foot, subway, train, and taxi. Every few weeks, she would arrive home with a box of Krispy Kreme donuts sourced from what was then the chain’s only franchise in the city—a brightly lit, L-shaped counter at the edge of Penn Station’s main concourse. I like to imagine her five-foot frame, worn by the week’s work, weaving through the mottled throngs of early nightfall. She pauses at the counter, reminded of my love for strawberry icing, and buys a dozen to bring home—a quiet apology for being away.

I was twenty-four years old, having just moved to Boston, when I honed my own rituals for monthly trips through Penn Station. Amid the constant shifts of new construction, I always descend through the station’s old entrance on Seventh Avenue, where escalators and air vents compete for most exasperated, and into the dull underbelly of the growing palimpsest. I still think about the vaulted glass ceilings and the long-gone echoes off travertine walls and the corner of the multiverse where my dad is next to me carrying a cup of soup and that big Tom Wolfe novel he never got to read. Fantasies are hard to elide, even if they do little to treat emptiness.

As the nine-foot ceilings press down on me, though, I wait for that moment when Krispy Kreme’s glow swallows the murky, peripheral light of the concourse. I stand at the same L-shaped counter where my mom stopped every month for eight years, living in a memory that is sweet and real and mine. I order two donuts—glazed with strawberry icing—and take them to go.