Her new life was so completely different from the familiar surroundings of her home town. There were no commuter trains in West Texas, or giant skyscrapers for that matter. Six months ago, Sarah had moved to New York after finally earning a marketing degree at Texas Tech University. Her new career in advertising was a radical departure from her former job as a flight attendant, and at times it seemed more confining, but she had decided to give it a year and see what developed. After that, who knew? She was still involved in a long-distance relationship with Daniel Meir, the young Israeli mathematician she had shared an adventure with in Italy the year before, and the pull there was strong. Now in her mid-twenties, she was rapidly approaching the established age limit for making life decisions, and the clock was running.
Thinking of time, she jumped into her small green Mini Cooper and gunned the car out onto the tree-lined highway that ran next to her condo. Approaching a curve, she tried to peer through the low ground fog hugging the dark road ahead, looking for the outline of a police cruiser lying in wait. Her heart jumped when she flew past a parked car locked in shadows. Damn! Was that a police car? Glancing up into her rear-view mirror, she held her breath, waiting for it to pull out behind her. Nothing happened. Sarah stepped on the gas.
Ten minutes later, the red brick train station appeared off to her right as she rounded the final curve and screeched into the parking lot. The train was still sitting in the station, but the platform was empty. Double damn! The passengers had already boarded, which meant the train was about to leave. Great! She was still considered the new girl in the office, and if she missed this train, she would be late for the battle of egos thinly disguised as the daily morning staff meeting. Not a good start in her new position.
Grabbing her purse from the front seat, she tried to juggle her keys, laptop, and coffee all at once as she kicked the door closed and punched the button on her key fob. Listening for the sound of the car’s doors locking behind her as she ran, Sarah bolted through the station and out onto the deserted platform.
As soon as she spotted the smiling conductor waving to her, she breathed a sigh of relief as she ran toward the only door in the train that was still open. Reaching out, the conductor grabbed her hand just as the train jerked, signaling the pull from the massive blue and silver engine as it began powering out of the station toward its final destination-New York City.
Closing the door, the conductor turned toward the breathless young woman and looked down at the gold pocket watch in his hand. “You just made it, Sarah.”
Sarah grinned as she tossed a strand of long, blonde hair back over her shoulder. “The cops are running radar again on the road from my house. One more speeding ticket and I’ll lose my license for the rest of the year.”
“I saw your little green Mini Cooper squeal into the parking lot, so I radioed the engineer.” The conductor’s eyes narrowed. “We held the train an extra minute, and you are now personally responsible for tarnishing the Long Island Railway’s proud record of being ninety-five percent on time.”
Sarah’s blue eyes blinked back at him. “Really?”
“No … we’ll make up the time at the next stop. Besides, I reserve the right to hold the train so important women like you won’t be late for work.” The gray-haired conductor winked. It was a ritual they played out every morning.
Sarah giggled to herself as she made her way forward past the familiar faces of the regular commuters. Most were peering into the screens of their laptops, while some of the older passengers were still clinging to the time-honored tradition of reading an actual newspaper. It seemed to be a point of pride to them-an act of generational rebellion proving to the world that they didn’t have to be tied to a battery-powered screen for instant communication. Any news worth having would be in the paper, they told themselves, the rest could wait.
Breathing more slowly now, Sarah slid into an empty seat and leaned her head against the glass just as the station disappeared behind them and the train gathered speed. She looked back inside the car at her fellow passengers, none of whom seemed at all interested in what was happening outside. It was obvious to her that the scenery had become too familiar to them, as if anything beyond the train’s windows was merely a rotating tableau of color played on an endless loop, the same old backdrop that had become almost soothing to them in its regularity.
Turning her attention back outside, Sarah eschewed joining her traveling brethren as they immersed themselves in their virtual offices or blackened their fingers with the ink of day-old news. Hers was a creative profession, and like others who were successful at inspired pursuits, she had learned over time that daydreaming, combined with the power of observation, was actually a mechanism whereby the trained observer could harvest ideas. Like the farmers back in Texas who stared at their bare fields, waiting for signs of life in the spring, Sarah waited for the tiny sprouts of ideas to spring forth in her imagination. One fleeting image, a single inspired idea, could be the beginning of an entire advertising campaign that would generate millions of dollars in revenue for her firm.
The rhythmic sway of the blue and silver train lulled Sarah into a state of sleepy detachment from her travelling companions as it continued on through the countryside, making several stops along the way, until soon, the scenery began to change as the speeding train crossed an invisible border that delineated the rural world of greenery from the urban grayness that heralded the train’s arrival on the outskirts of the fabled city.
Tall buildings loomed overhead as the train reached the East River and made a final downward plunge into the tunnel that ran beneath its dark, frigid water. From the openness of the countryside into the claustrophobic dinginess of the underground world beneath the city, the train began to slow as it clattered toward mid-town Manhattan and finally screeched to a stop alongside a brightly-lit platform in one of the busiest rail stations in the world-New York’s Penn Station.
Located below Madison Square Garden, beneath the uninspired and unimaginative glass and steel office tower known as Pennsylvania Plaza, Penn Station was a gigantic subterranean railway hub that connected with the New York City subway system and served almost 600,000 passengers a day at a rate of up to a thousand every 90 seconds. These incredible numbers made Penn Station the single busiest passenger transportation facility in North America.
Amid the din of constant arrivals and departures, Sarah exited her train and walked down a flight of grimy concrete stairs to the subway platform below. There, she would wait for the subway train that would whisk her to her final stop fifteen blocks away.
As a casual observer of all things beautiful, Sarah winced as she looked around at her drab surroundings. Closing her eyes, she thought back to what had happened here in the past. She knew that this space had once been the site of one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, and that its senseless destruction fifty years earlier had been the catalyst for the entire architectural preservation movement that had sprung up all across America.
Before the present, modernist-inspired station was built in the 1960’s, this space had once been home to a much grander Pennsylvania Station. The original structure had been a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style of architecture and had been heralded around the world as one of the most beautiful buildings ever created. Built in 1910 of pink granite and surrounded by a colonnade of Corinthian columns, the spectacular building was a breathtaking, monumental entrance to New York City.