Dear President Obama, Save My Father's Train Station...

by Maura Moynihan Info

Maura Moynihan is the founding director of Friends of Moynihan Station. She lives in New York City.

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So where did all the money go? I shall leave that to investigative reporters, oversight committees and political scientists to study the causal pathways of dysfunction in government. Paralysis and waste clog Albany's arteries, nothing appears to break the logjam. New Yorkers pay the highest taxes in the country, but we don't get a lot of public works for our money. One is thankful that the MTA and Thruway function at all. The billions in transportation funds Senator Moynihan delivered to New York never seem to wend their way into structural improvements, they barely cope with maintenance.

As we waited for the expiry of the wretched Pataki era, Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton protected the money and lobbied for more. Jerry Nadler, midtown's congressman, was diligent and supportive. Then in February 2008, the new governor, Eliot Spitzer, went to Washington for meetings on Moynihan Station, the budget crisis, and an assignation in the Mayfair Hotel. The Spitzer administration collapsed, and the dazzling mirage of Moynihan Station evaporated yet again.

In these years after 9/11 and the Iraq War, our roads and subways crumbled while hedge funds soared and Manhattan gasped and shuddered under a construction boom. Wrecking crews flattened city blocks to make way for luxury condominium towers and corporate monoliths. The new, obscenely overwrought, vacant Lehman Brothers headquarters hovers over Times Square, a symbol of Wall Street's vandalism of public trust, an empty monument to the era.

And now comes the reckoning, a massive financial crisis, a deadly virus, a global tsunami. On Friday December 5, the Labor Department announced that employers cut 533,000 jobs in November. And in his weekly radio address on December 6, President-elect Barack Obama presented his plan to put millions of people to work by "making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s."

Senator Moynihan once said; "Money used for public works isn't spending; it's investing." When five years hence, Americans will have to live like the rest of the world, with fuel rationing and compulsory car-pooling, regions with trains will fare better than suburbia and exurbia. Our future quite literally depends upon our collective willpower to get things done, with speed and with vision. We must invest in public transportation and energy efficiency now, not in ten years, nor five years, or we invite catastrophe.

I watched teams of skilled men and women build the shiny new Lehman Brothers headquarters while the Moynihan Station meetings dithered over preservation details. It is those workers living throughout the five boroughs that need jobs and trains. The Moynihan Station funds are still there. Let us spend them as the late senator wished—for the people.

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Maura Moynihan is the founding director of Friends of Moynihan Station. She lives in New York City.