Step into Penn Station, and you enter a world of motion, a cathedral of transit where millions of lives brush past each other daily. Yet amid the clamor and the echoing footsteps, something feels off. Something that doesn’t just ask you to move — it insists that you hurry, that you kiss the ring of the architecture itself, which preens itself on its sterility. The hostile architecture of Penn Station is filled with peculiar design choices, which are fundamentally just excuses for exclusion disguised as public policy, substituting the illusion of safety for real, human-centered design.
Take the pyramids, ubiquitous in hostile architecture. Three jagged, brightly painted wooden structures perched atop steel bollards at the East End Gateway. Aesthetically, they are odd, almost playful. Practically, they are cruel. Their purpose, we are told, is to “deter unauthorized activity.” The translation: Don’t sit, don’t rest, don’t occupy this space in any way that suggests you belong. For travelers with aching feet, or those waiting endlessly for delayed trains, these pyramids are a physical reminder that comfortability is not permitted. For the homeless individuals who once used this corner as temporary refuge, the message is harsher: You are not welcome. The pyramids don’t protect anyone. They do nothing for safety, and they exist only to push bodies away. Crystal McFadden, a woman who once found brief solace in this corridor, called them exactly what they are: displacement disguised as safety.
Then there’s Moynihan Train Hall, the city’s embarrassingly overpriced surrogate of a crown jewel. The atrium stretches high above, glass ceilings spilling sunlight onto polished floors. Onlookers might call it beautiful, monumental, even uplifting. But there is a catch: Seating is scarce, hidden and reserved for ticket-holding passengers. Outside these 320 spots, the hall feels empty in all the wrong ways: travelers lean against cold walls, perch precariously on luggage or crouch on the floor, trying to make a place for themselves in a design that refuses to accommodate them. I’ve done all three while waiting for the train, and have been accosted by the police for trying to be comfortable. The homeless, the exhausted commuter, the traveler delayed by circumstance, the tired tourist looking for a place to rest — they are all collateral damage in the pursuit of a perfectly curated space. Safety is the excuse, exclusion is the reality and spectacle is the order. And yet, the irony is profound. Commuters stumble over obstacles, wrestle with fatigue on cold floors or navigate spaces that have been deliberately stripped of comfort. The homeless still exist, instead lining the streets around Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, only with amplified tension, discomfort and unease. Long-distance travellers like me must both stumble over obstacles and line the streets in discomfort or time their arrivals exactly down to the minute.
New York City’s public spaces should serve humans, not ideals of order or the illusion of safety. Benches, warm lighting, publicly accessible waiting areas — these are not luxuries, but rather necessities for a functional train station. Penn Station is by contrast, an aesthetic masquerade, replacing genuine purpose with cold, exclusionary gestures. The pyramids, the barren halls, the hidden seats, the pointless eye of the police — they are gestures not of safety but discomfort, nor of transit but alienation. Penn Station, in this sense, is a cautionary tale. Making a space inhospitable creates anxiety, not order. You do not protect the vulnerable; you erase them — but at the same time, make them feel more exposed than ever. You do not make commuters feel safe; you remind them that they are only tolerated while they move quickly enough, sit quietly enough, disperse efficiently enough. And then, on top of all of that, you discourage people from actually using the space: Fewer people eat at the restaurants in the station and fewer people take the train. But, perhaps that is the point of all this. If the city does indeed desire — as it ought to — monumental public spaces that both serve its people and fill the onlooker with awe (in the way that the original Penn Station, with all of its flaws, actually did), it must retool hostile architecture, moving toward its elimination. It cannot end homelessness by hiding it, only by actually dealing with its root causes: through policies that actually support homeless people. Until that happens, Penn Station and Moynihan will be neither a crown jewel, nor a beckoning face of the city, but a monument to discomfort — where every step reminds us that, in the name of safety, the city has forgotten what it means to be human. It is a space that will remain as sterile and avoided as much as it is an embarrassment and insult to the city’s dignity.
Kathryn-Alexandra Rossi, FCRH ‘27, is a philosophy and economics double major from Arlington, Virginia.
