Penn and Tell 'er

Jacques Cossart was a French Huguenot who came to New Amsterdam (now New York City) in 1662. His descendants eventually changed their surname to Cassat, then Cassatt, after Robert, a stock broker/land speculator, decided he needed the extra "t".

Name changes were popular in North America during the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly among those wanting to "fit in" with the Anglo hegemony. Another reason concerned those looking to distance themselves from liability -- a local 20th century example being Ace Gallery's Douglas Chrismas, who dropped the "t" (in Christmas) after the practice of selling the same Rauschenberg three times (at once) became problematic. 

Robert and his wife Katherine Kelso Johnston had seven children, two of them well-known. One was Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), a respected painter in the Impressionist tradition; the other was A. J. Cassatt (1839-1906), the seventh president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the visionary behind Penn Station (1910-1963), what he imagined would be a "pathway into New York City" and a "depot of the Gods."

I am not sure why Penn Station was torn down after only 53 years of service. Surely money had something to do with it, the land being worth more than what it was being used for (the current site includes that cash mill known as Madison Square Gardens). The wider availability of air travel (over rail travel) supplied further justification, as did the symbolic "need" to update a city that, after World War II, emerged as the seat of Modernism and made this Neo-Classical Gothic structure more a view to the past than a "pathway" to the future.

The last and best known pictures of Penn Station were taken by Walker Evans and stand as an example of "salvage anthropology" (documenting that which is about to be destroyed). A more recent example does not yet have a name but comes to us as contemporary (modern) art: Stan Douglas's Penn Station's Half Century (2020).