If you don’t watch “Mad Men,” you should. In the latest episode, Sterling-Cooper is asked to put together an ad campaign supporting the controversial demolition of the gorgeous Penn Station and the development of Madison Square Garden in its place. Kevin Arnovitz of TrueHoop wrote a nice piece covering the episode’s topic.
More than forty years after Madison Square Garden was opened above the new, dingy Penn Station, we regard it as basketball’s holiest site — a place whose mystique inspires basketball greats such as Michael Jordan, Reggie Miller, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James to their greatest heights. These NBA titans rhapsodize about the Garden. Bryant calls it the “mecca of basketball.”
Four decades later, it’s ironic that the building that was the bête noire of architectural preservationists has become the defining symbol of basketball preservationists — a receptacle for the sort of sentimentalism that fueled the opposition to its creation.
Nice work.
