Excavations were going on in the Baths on a langorous summer afternoon in late June of 1901 which the American architect Charles Follen McKim spent there. That afternoon bore fruit soon after, when he was asked to design for the Pennsylvania Railroad a great terminal station in New York. McKim, lover of Rome and founder of the American Academy there, belonged to the school of architects for whom the grand manner, as found in Roman baths, the Pantheon, and the Coliseum, formed the basis of design for works of the first rank. He desired to symbolize in Pennsylvania Station the monumental gateway to a great city, which should at the same time perform efficiently its function of handling large crowds. To a man of his training and prejudices, the Baths of Caracalla seemed to fill the bill. He is reported to have assembled on one occasion a huge band of workmen in the Baths in Rome, simply to test the aesthetic effect of huge scale upon crowds passing under the arches. (Crowds there must always have been, in the heyday of the baths, motley, colorful crowds, speaking many tongues; there is easily room for 2500 patrons at a time. We may imagine them bathing, sauntering, making assignations; conversing idly or upon philosophical subjects; thronging the lecture rooms, the library, the picture-gallery; running, jumping, racing, ball-playing, or watching spectator-sports in the stadium at the back.) The station plan (Fig. 12.6) shows how creatively McKim imitated Roman architecture. The succession of portico, vestibule, arcade, vestibule, staircase, which leads to what before remodelling of 1958 was the climax in the great central concourse, is noble architectural language, beautiful ordering of space, which Hadrian would have understood, and so is the balance in the façade, the alternating rhythms throughout the building of open and closed, big and little, wide and narrow. In the arcade, the repeated rhythms (now spoiled by advertising) emphasize the traditional, and the movement which is the essence of transportation. The great central hall, once a pool of open space, is even larger (340 × 210 feet, and 100 feet high) than the one that inspired it in the Baths; it is longer than the nave of St. Peter’s. In it McKim contrived to preserve simplicity, dignity, and monumentality in spite of mechanical distractions, as when he used the protruding tops of ventilator shafts as pedestals for lamp-standards. The other refinements, too, are in the Roman manner and material. The rich golden stone facing of the great room is travertine imported from Tivoli, here used for the first time in America (and now badly in need of cleaning). The structural steel and glass in the concourse leading to the trains may have been inspired by the girders in the Baths of Caracalla. The statistics that record 1140 carloads of pink granite brought from New England to build the half-mile of exterior walls are in the Roman