http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/nyregion/hoboken-terminal-with-flair-and-grandeur-is-a-survivor.html 2016-10-01 02:58:16 Hoboken Terminal, With Flair and Grandeur, Is a Survivor The architectural elements that made the elegant station a landmark were apparently undamaged in the train crash that killed a woman and injured over 100 others. === Fifteen years ago, the writer That Hoboken. The one in New Jersey. Is there any other? Then he saw Hoboken Terminal, which opened in 1907. “One of the greatest railroad terminals ever built,” he called it in the article. He is still rhapsodizing about it. “It was designed with a flair and a panache and a swagger that’s more common to far bigger terminals,” he said on Friday, a day after a The station is one of Hoboken’s famous landmarks, along with the Maxwell House coffee sign, a giant neon creation with the “good to the last drop” logo that was disassembled in 1993, a year after the coffee plant shut down. The architectural elements that won the station It is a survivor, the last of five passenger terminals operated by competing railroad companies in the days before there was a tunnel into Manhattan. Back then, New York-bound trains went only as far as Hoboken or Jersey City; rail passengers had to switch to a ferry for the last leg of the trip. The other terminals were doomed when tunnels under the Hudson River and the old Pennsylvania Station opened around 1910. Hoboken Terminal carried on, a bastion of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (later the Erie Lackawanna Railway). It was where the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western’s first electrified train left from, with Thomas A. Edison at the controls, in 1930. The destination was Montclair, and the New Jersey Transit commuter trains that go there now follow the same route. The original architect was Murchison was a well-connected and debonair figure across the Hudson from Hoboken. He played a part in the famous He also conducted the orchestra. In the zany spirit of the occasion, it featured such unconventional instruments as pneumatic riveting machines, steam pipes, ocean liner whistles and sledgehammers. Mr. Klara said Hoboken Terminal was the latest of several terminals on the site, and was designed so it would not go the way of the others, all of which had burned down. “Strip away all the copper,” he The walls were five inches thick, according to an article in Engineering News in 1906 by the engineer on the project, Charles C. Hurlbut. And Allen W. Kratz, a historic preservation consultant who lives in Hoboken, said “the only wood in the building are the wooden pilings covered twice a day by the rising tide.” But in terms of fire, the thick walls were just the beginning. “The danger of panic was considered,” Hurlbut wrote, “and consequently all waiting-rooms and passenger concourses were separated from offices or storerooms by fireproof doors and windows.” It also had an innovative train shed, with what Mr. Kratz called “gullwing canopies” that let out smoke and soot from the locomotives. The design “quickly became the standard for railroads,” he said. The station was flooded with five feet of water in “The tower had absolutely no functionality except advertising,” Mr. Kratz said. None at all? Didn’t the clock work? “Well, yes,” Mr. Kratz said. “It was a very tall timepiece.”