…and the busy travel season, comes this elegantly crafted ode to one of the ugliest places on earth, New York’s Pennsylvania Station:

Don’t stop to contemplate, if you’re there — you’ll be trampled. This holiday season, the quicker you shove your fellow passengers, the quicker you can shove off from Aunt Gladys’s. Find an exit — there are plenty of exits, which is one of the many underappreciated features of this completely unappreciated anti-landmark — and get out fast.

There. Where are you? You are in New York.

The city beneath our city is a delightfully ill-lighted, incomprehensibly organized, low-ceilinged, viewless labyrinth. Harried people surge through its concourses and tunnels in perpendicular lines, mean salmon in puffy coats going always upstream. Soldiers with combat weapons lurk outside the city’s most unhygienic group lavatories. There is nowhere to sit.

Ah, New York. Those who’ve visited Penn Station — or, more likely, run through it on the way to someplace else — know how accurate that is. Read more.