IRVING FELT, PROPHET.

That's Irving Felt of New York's Felt family, which is to say the local nomenklatura providing their name to the (since renamed) Felt Forum upstairs from Penn Station, who responded, as quoted in Lorraine Diehl's The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station, as saying in 1962 to architects protesting the "redevelopment" of The Pennsylvania Station, with "Fifty years from now, when it's time for our Center to be torn down, there will be a new group of architects who will protest."

It's closer to sixty years, but Ed Driscoll caught exactly that.

It happens first as tragedy, then as farce: The story of Penn Station has come full circle. After all, the 1963 demolition of the original 1910 Pennsylvania Station — an opulent Beaux-Arts building modeled on the Roman Baths of Caracalla — was considered such a grave crime against architecture that it gave rise to the historical preservation movement itself. Now that same movement is seeking to provide safe harbor for the reviled underworld expanse that still carries its name.

Among the monuments we will be judged for having destroyed must be numbered common sense, smothered under layers of process worship.  City Lab contributor Kriston Capps correctly concludes,

The idea of even thinking about saving a facility so hostile to light and joy and sensible wayfinding as Penn Station — even for the larger purpose of preserving some arguably historical structures in the neighborhood — ought to be a clear sign that something has gone off the rails. At the very least, it should be a reset for the blunt tool that historic preservation has become in the hands of artisan naysayers who want to stop the future in the name of saving the past.

I bet, though, these "artisan naysayers" are quick to declare their pronouns and otherwise participate in destroying those parts of the past that worked.