GIMBELS PASSAGE SIGN

WHERE can this tiled sign pointing the way to Pennsylvania Station, the 7th Avenue Subway and the “Statler Hilton” be found? It’s in an 800-foot long pedestrian corridor beneath West 33rd Street connecting 6th and 8th Avenues under the former Gimbels department store, now called the Manhattan Mall, and was called the Gimbels Passage. I don’t have a specific date when it was opened but from the looks of the tiled signage and other IND-style lettering on other signage in the passageway, it likely opened when the 6th Avenue IND saw its first customers at 34th Street in 1940. It closed in 1986.

In 2010, the NY Post real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo described it thusly:

Back then, the interminable, 800-foot stroll, as long as four city blocks, was too much even for my youthful spirit of adventure. Street weirdos and sex hawkers on Eighth Avenue were amusing; knife-wielding hustlers, legless beggars and the howling insane in a dimly lit corridor a mere nine feet wide for much of its length were not. The mad harmonica player who stalked me end to end was the last straw.

Once you were inside, there was no way out except to reach the other end. In the midst of teeming Midtown, bare-bulb fixtures like those in mines marked a path through a Calcutta-like sprawl of diseased, predatory humanity.

The corridor seemed to exist beyond the reach of any authority. Vornado says it’s owned by the MTA. The MTA says it’s owned by Amtrak, which told me it thinks it owns a portion of it. Who was in charge 35 years ago is an even deeper mystery.

Where was the Statler Hilton? It was what the Hotel Pennsylvania was called between 1958 and 1979; after the Statlers took it over in 1948 it was Hotel Statler, and then there was a subsequent takeover by the Hiltons in 1958. It reverted to Hotel Pennsylvania in the 1990s, while real estate company Vornado let it gradually decline in quality, shuttered it in 2020, and demolished it from 2022-2023. A tower called 15 Penn will eventually replace it.

Though Penn Station’s Long Island Rail Road terminal was renovated with a higher ceiling and wider corridors from 2020-2023, Governor Kathy Hochul and other real estate interests desire to renovate the rest of Penn Station by hook or crook, and reopening the passage, which would allow connections between A, C, E and 1, 2, 3 trains and B, D, F, M, N, R and Q trains as well as the PATH, could be in the cards. But it would likely have to be maintained and secured by a private company.

Photo: A.C. Sardella

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12/12/24