Through the Empire State Development Corporation, and Governor Cuomo’s office, PPA was awarded the commission to design the clock for the new Moynihan Train Hall, a space reimagined by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill as a vital transportation hub within McKim, Mead & White’s historic Farley Post Office Building. The conversion of the Post Office into a new extension of Penn Station was the vision of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Train Hall’s namesake, who first introduced plans for a renovation in the early 1990s. 

PPA’s 12-foot-tall clock was inspired by the machined angles found in designs from the golden age of railroad travel and evokes the best of Art Deco, a modern classical style emblematic of the Jazz Age in New York City. The ribbed case with echeloned extensions is a nod to the stepped forms and continuous vertical folds of Jazz Age and Art Deco skyscrapers and is presented in a luminous pewter-like finish that reflects the ever-changing natural light spilling through SOM’s monumental glass skylight. PPA worked in collaboration with Hyde Park Mouldings who fabricated the clock out of GFRG panels attached to a steel frame and coordinated with Americlock on the structure and internal mechanisms.  The clock face, with numbers set in a typeface designed in 1936 for road and railroad signage, pays tribute to the history of New York and a decade considered to be the golden age of American rail travel.