tradition, and so is the vast extent of the eight-acre structure, and the six years it took to build. The efficiency is Roman, too: access on all four sides, carriage drives twice as wide as the normal New York street of 1910--when the building was opened--a traffic-flow plan that separated incoming and outgoing passengers. Pennsylvania Station belongs to a vanished era, an era of princely magnificence, of willingness to spend on purely aesthetic pleasure. The young architectural fellows of McKim’s Academy in Rome are impatient with what it stands for, but perhaps they are letting their understandable and proper scorn of soulless copying--of which there is far too much in American monumental architecture--stand in the way of their appreciation of a building which has worn well, and earned accolades--especially by contrast with recent tawdry and misguided additions in plastic--from such emancipated critics, friendly to modern trends in architecture, as Talbot Hamlin and Lewis Mumford. In a day of what a less temperate critic than these has called “the monstrous repetition of cellular facades cloaked with vitreous indifference” by “sedulous apes to the latest expressions of technological baboonery,” it may be salutary to look with understanding at how successful a modern architect of genius can be with a Roman model. * * * * * Roman baths needed oceans of water. It was supplied by another triumph of Roman engineering, the system of aqueducts. The eleventh and last of the ancient aqueducts was built by the Emperor Alexander Severus in A.D. 226; the earliest, the Aqua Appia, dates back to the same builder and the same year--312 B.C.--as the _regina viarum_. The network (Fig. 12.8) supplied Rome with over 250,000,000 gallons of water every twenty-four hours. When New York was thrice the size of Severan Rome, its aqueducts supplied only 425,000,000 gallons daily. [Illustration: FIG. 12.6 New York, Pennsylvania Station, McKim plan. (A. H. Granger, _Charles Follen McKim_, p. 77)] [Illustration: FIG. 12.7 New York, Pennsylvania Station, waiting room, before “modernization.” (Granger, _op. cit._, fac. p. 82)] [Illustration: FIG. 12.8 Rome and environs, map showing aqueducts. (V. Scramuzza and P. MacKendrick, _The Ancient World_, Fig. 33a)]