Community Architect Baltimore: The future of Penn Station

Baltimore has a tremendous asset which is not often talked about: It sits on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (NEC), the closest thing the US has in terms of high speed rail and by far the busiest rail corridor in the country. Penn Station is Amtrak's 8th busiest station nationally, all positive top rankings that should be a strategy how to move Baltimore into the future just like the Port and airport.

With its comprehensive NEC plans, Amtrak hopes to double the 900,000 daily corridor ridership by 2040, not counting the riders which use Penn Station to ride MARC trains planning to offer an additional 16,000 seats a day on top of their current 30,000 daily trips by 2020. Penn Station needs a lot more platform and station space to process those passenger numbers and will become an economic engine in the process.

The lesser known backside of Penn Station (Photo: Philipsen)

Congressman Elijah Cummings has been promoting Penn Station for decades and he was there again on Tuesday night when Amtrak had invited to a "kick-off" event dubbed "Next Stop: Baltimore Penn Station" when he spoke to a filled auditorium in the UB Business Center.

“The Baltimore community has waited a long time, too long for the redevelopment of Penn Station” (Elijah Cummings)

In spite of the lack of strategic discussion about Baltimore's role on the NEC, Amtrak's call for envisioning the future of the station and the lands surrounding it, found a lively response from community members, transportation activists, train buffs and preservationists.

All the basics of a community planning session where there, the sticky dots to indicate the travel mode with which participants arrived, where they lived or worked and their motivation to attend. The round tables on which participants rotate from topic to topic and register their ideas, concerns and comments which a member of the project team staffs to record the essentials.

Visioning the future of Penn Station: Three rows of tables, three topics
(Photo: Philipsen)

Also part of the visioning session, the project overview and the obligatory declaration that this visioning session "was the beginning of a journey" (Natali Shieh, Amtrak), an assertion that is far from reality, considering how long efforts have been underway to get a handle on the future of the historic station itself and the fallow lands that surround it. The last step in this tiring journey was the December 2017 selection of a master developer team consisting of developers, architects and contractors known as Penn Station Partners. The team includes Beatty Development Group, Cross Street Partners, Armada Hoffler, Gensler, RK&K and Cho Benn Holback.

Whatever all those firms have done since December, they didn't show it in this session except that Gensler's Chris Rzomp asked a number of "what if" questions which suggested that the firm had done some initial analysis. One of the what-if questions dealt with the chopped up station plaza and its many conflicts between vehicles and pedestrians and the idea of moving all intermodal connections to the east and west of the station so a pedestrian only front plaza could be created. Another what-if question asked about taking all the transit functions out of the historic building to a larger modern building. Various renderings from the initial submission give an inkling that this design idea has been around for a while, showing a modern station hall on the north-side of the tracks. However, Elaine Asal, outreach specialist at Gensler, insisted that the community meeting on Tuesday was, in fact, a beginning.

Available real estate in the study area (Amtrak presentation)

Stripping the historic building of its main function, to be a glorious portal to train travel would be a rather alarming prospect. Technological changes in the way how people purchase tickets and how trains are operated may mean that less space is needed for ticketing, that waiting times would be shorther and that amenities would be more integrated with arrival and departure. At the same time, changes in retail would also indicate that retail wouldn't have to play the predominant role it does in Washington's Union Station.

On the other hand, table discussions indicated a desire to open the station up to the north side and in that sense the northern station hall in Gensler's renderings is just the right move. The round-tables discussed the three topics Public space, station and transit, character and identity. Comments ranged from dislike for the Borofsky sculpture to considerations of how Washington workers could be seduced to buying homes near Penn Station in Baltimore and worries about pricing out the affordability of Station North. Several participants stressed the importance of integrating the inter-city bus service such as Bolt Bus better and make the light rail connection easier to use. The 18 table facilitators from Gensler, Cross Street Partners, Beatty Development, the Central Baltimore Partnership and Amtrak will huddle soon to distill the greater wisdom of it all.

Meanwhile Amtrak will proceed with improvements on platforms and tracks in preparation of the launch of the second generation Acela trains in 2021. Current Amtrak NEC trains reach about 150mph top speeds and sustained sppeds of about $120mph.

The hope for transit oriented development (TOD) on Amtrak owned sites near stations is part of a nationwide "asset monetization" effort by Amtrak which includes similar initiatives in Chicago, DC, New York and Philadelphia, all going through the same three part proposal stages Penn station completed. Amtrak is looking to leverage what real estate it owns towards a private public partnership (P3) that self funds facility improvements and the creation of attractive multi modal transportation hubs. One of the nation's larger P3 efforts involving a historic Amtrak station has been completed in Denver where TOD around Denver's Union Station has created a flourishing new development area.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA