Pennsylvania Station was ruined long before it was wrecked.

Its demolition is the stuff of New York legend, an act of architectural vandalism so unspeakable that it gave rise to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, saved Grand Central Terminal and upended the city’s development priorities.

What this version of history overlooks, however, is that the Penn Station that was torn down between 1963 and 1966 was scarcely the building it had been a half-century earlier — luminous, voluminous and Roman in the grandeur it was given by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and the architect Charles Follen McKim.