![]() ![]() I’ve long had a theory about that train hall: no one really liked it, but it was hard not to love. It’s actually enough to make one miss the fluorescent-lit and occasionally fetid corridors of Penn Station’s old LIRR concourse. The countless televisions and digital billboards instead show Yankees games and advertisements for sports betting. And for those on a tight schedule, bad news: there’s not a single flatscreen showing train departures nearby. Ramen, still haven’t opened three months after the food hall’s debut. In fact some of concessionaires, including Jacob’s Pickles, the Burger Joint, and E.A.K. Moynihan’s website says everything except the bar shutters at 10 p.m., but in reality most vendors closes by 8:30 p.m. It will surprise no one that the shiny new hub is located in the same building - the landmark Farley Post Office - where Facebook recently inked a deal for 750K-square-feet of office space.Ĭall it public transit gentrification, which perhaps explains the following: s’mores cookies prepared “a la minute,” piping hot bowls of ramen (have fun eating those on a moving train), a nighttime DJ who spins clubby remixes out of Fleetwood Mac, a mini-gourmet mart hawking vacuum sealed packages of goose ‘nduja, and a chic sandwich shop that sells most sandwiches for $15 - alongside bottles of gold foil-wrapped olive oil for $25. Moynihan Hall is the type of disaster that happens when developers build a train hall that doubles as a culinary destination rather than one that serves as a functional place for those who spend a big part of their lives on trains. In a city that’s increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable to commuters - roughly a third of the Long Islanders traveling in earn less than $50,000 annually - things are a bit more complicated than simply serving damn good food. And the vendor, like most others, sits more than the length of a football field away from most Long Island Rail Road tracks, and it closes well before 8 p.m. Sauce also dares to omit the classic New York cheese slice in favor of something closer to a margherita. That’s an expensive snack at $11 after tax, a steep price for those who rely on pizza as a filling nightly meal. Slices are five bucks each - well above the city average - and they’re so airy that one can polish off two of them in three minutes flat. Things are different in these new digs, alas. For over two decades, I’d grab cheap midnight slices from the now-closed Rose’s at Penn Station and then hop on a train just steps away. ![]() A regular slice exhibits that classic balance of milky mozzarella and faintly tart tomatoes, while the vodka slice deploys just enough cream to soften the blow of the red sauce. They sport cracker-like crusts with a gentle chew - arguably a nod to a certain Staten Island style. Sauce, the official pizzeria of the sprawling West Side terminal’s three-month-old food hall, sells what are surely some of the city’s better thin crust pies. The $1.6 billion Moynihan Train Hall, a new, natural light-filled transit hub for commuters from Long Island, Boston, Washington D.C., and elsewhere, shares one crucial feature with the windowless, subterranean Penn Station next door: It serves a damn good slice. ![]()
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