McKim, Mead, and White in the context of Fin de siècle

Pennsylvania Station (often abbreviated to Penn Station) was a historic railroad station in New York City that was built for, named after, and originally occupied by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR). The station occupied an 8-acre (3.2 ha) plot bounded by Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 31st and 33rd Streets in Midtown Manhattan. Because the station shared its name with several stations in other cities, it was sometimes called New York Pennsylvania Station. Originally completed in 1910, the aboveground portions of the building were demolished between 1963 and 1966, and the underground concourses and platforms were heavily renovated to form the current Pennsylvania Station within the same footprint.

Designed by McKim, Mead, and White and completed in 1910, the station enabled direct rail access to New York City from the south for the first time. Its above ground head house and train shed were considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the great architectural works of New York City. Underground, the station contained 11 platforms serving 21 tracks, in approximately the same layout as the current Penn Station, which has had various intervening modifications. The original building was one of the first stations to include separate waiting rooms for arriving and departing passengers, and when built, these were among the city's largest public spaces.

William Rutherford Mead (August 20, 1846 – June 19, 1928) was an American architect who was the "Center of the Office" of McKim, Mead, and White, a noted Gilded Age architectural firm. The firm's other founding partners were Charles Follen McKim (1847–1909) and Stanford White (1853–1906).