What has been forgotten in this hysterical nostalgia is that our current Penn Station is also a miracle: pitiless and comically jury-rigged, sure, but miraculous. Three railroads and two subway lines deliver more than half a million people each day directly to almost anywhere except Grand Central. It is one of the great achievements of New York.

Don’t stop to contemplate, if you’re there  you’ll be trampled. This holiday season, the quicker you shove your fellow passengers, the quicker you can shove off from Aunt Gladys’s. Find an exit  there are plenty of exits, which is one of the many underappreciated features of this completely unappreciated anti-landmark  and get out fast.

There. Where are you? You are in New York.

The city beneath our city is a delightfully ill-lighted, incomprehensibly organized, low-ceilinged, viewless labyrinth. Harried people surge through its concourses and tunnels in perpendicular lines, mean salmon in puffy coats going always upstream. Soldiers with combat weapons lurk outside the city’s most unhygienic group lavatories. There is nowhere to sit. The “talking kiosk” that serves the visually impaired has been heckling Long Island Rail Road customers with chirping for so long that we have begun to associate birdsong with the most terrible things.

“Through it one entered the city like a god ... one scuttles in now like a rat,” the architectural historian Vincent Scully wrote, in the most quoted aphorism about why it is our duty to adulate Old Penn Station and despise the current one. But this Penn Station is not here to flatter you. It is here to move you, if you know where you are going. If you know where you are going, it will deliver you on your personal atomized commuter-trail, through the entrance of your choice, down the crazy dark stairs you want, to the very door you want of the train you want. Why should you be forced through a grand entrance and into a mob of thousands of people on the floor of a great hall, if all you desire is the 7:49 to Flushing?

It’s fair, though, to complain that Penn Station is brutal to strangers. The basics aren’t that difficult. Please. It’s just an avenue-block-wide rectangle. But would it kill someone, for example, to put up a few more maps, and of considerably less confusing quality? You can find one by the handicapped elevator at the Long Island Railroad exit on 34th Street, if you can find the hallway at all. (It’s next to the doorman whose full-time job appears to be preventing the confused from straying into One Penn Plaza.)