“Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.”
— G. K. Chesterton

I’m in a creative drought (it happens). I got nothing. It’s a long weekend and I’ve done a little cycling.

(1) A couple of random quotes from Conquering Gotham by Jill Jonnes based on a Flickr thread about Victoria and Euston Station(s) in London.

The AGBANY architects were stunned at how few of their fellow citizens seemed to care. “People never heard of landmarks in 1962,” said Norval White, chairman of the group. “They didn’t realize what they were about to lose.” Norman Jaffe, another member, recalls his boss, architect Philip Johnson, warning, “You can picket all you want, but it’s not going to do any good. If you want to save Pennsylvania Station, you have to buy it.” “There was not consciousness among most New Yorkers of the value of old architecture,” said Elliot Willensky.

On October 28, 1963, as the very skies seemed to weep a gentle rain, desecration and demolition began. By eleven o’clock, the first of sculptor Weinman’s twenty-two imperial Roman eagles, symbol of the Caesars, had been detached from its aerie and lowered to the pavement. There that imposing stone raptor looked trapped, the three-ton centerpiece of a group photo of grinning officials wearing hard hats. The station’s main clock was sentimentally set at 10:53 to signal the opening date of the station, 1910, and its lifetime, fifty-three years. That afternoon the AGBANY architects reappeared to march silently in protest, wearing black armbands and hoisting picket signs reading simply, “SHAME!” as the wrecking team attacked with jackhammers.

(2) “Night and Day”: Vestiges of a Lost Penn Station (Beyer Blinder Belle)
(2a) The Destruction of Penn Station (PBS)
(2b) Penn Station, Reborn? (CJ)

(3) A scan from London Railway Atlas by Joe Brown: