The Flame night club in downtown St. Paul lived up to its name in August 1950.

A fire that started inside the club, which was housed on the ground floor of the Hotel Jewell on Fifth Street, ripped through the five-story building on a Sunday afternoon.

Firefighters quickly gave up on saving the hotel and focused their efforts on rescuing guests and preventing the flames from spreading to neighboring structures.

“Dense smoke pouring from the building made the State Capitol only a blurred image to spectators on the scene,” the Pioneer Press reported the next day. “At Lexington baseball park, spectators standing on the roof could see only the top of the First National Bank building poking up through a layer of smoke.”

Although no one was seriously injured by the blaze, the hotel — located where Osborn370 is today — was reduced to a burned-out shell standing in a pile of rubble.

With losses estimated at $275,000, it was one of the most destructive fires in St. Paul history.

‘Looks like there’s a fire in there’

The fire was first reported about 3 p.m. by a passing motorist, who saw smoke escaping from the offices of the St. Paul Hockey Club, which shared the first floor of the Jewell with the Flame.

“You’d better send someone to the hockey club office,” he told the dispatcher. “There’s smoke coming out under the door and it looks like there’s a fire in there.”

The hockey club and the Flame were both closed, but roughly 85 people were registered at the Jewell.

Hotel staff quickly began evacuating guests while firefighters rushed to the scene. Most of the Jewell’s occupants were able to leave safely, but some made dramatic escapes down fire department ladders.

Thousands of curious onlookers flocked to the burning building as firefighters deployed 30 hoses at once to hammer the flames with at least 6 million gallons of water.

The St. Paul Fire Department summoned all 410 of its personnel to duty — even some who were on vacation rushed back to battle the blaze. They worked late into the night, extinguishing flare-ups with the help of firefighters from neighboring cities.

Totally gutted

A pair of Minneapolis firefighters arrive with hoses outside downtown St. Paul’s Hotel Jewell to aid the city’s fire department in battling the blaze that destroyed the building on Aug. 13, 1950. (Ted Strasser / Pioneer Press)

By morning, the Jewell had been totally gutted and two of its exterior walls had collapsed. Demolition crews worked for more than a week straight to tear down the building’s remains and clear rubble blocking Fifth Street.

In the days following the fire, officials determined the cause was likely a discarded cigarette or faulty wiring in the Flame, which was known at the time for drawing big-name musical acts to its stage.

The owner of the Flame later told St. Paul Dispatch columnist Oliver Towne that he was on a flight home from Chicago when he saw flames from the plane as it passed over downtown.

“My God, that’s my investment going up in smoke,” he screamed.

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There are about 160,000 gas stations in the United States, the vast majority of them built and run through the private sector to maximize efficiency and convenience for motorists. And then there’s the EV charging network overseen by federal bureaucrats that cost American taxpayers $7.5 billion and produced 68 stations with 384 ports.

The contrast couldn’t be more stark.

In 2021, the Democratic Congress passed and former President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion monstrosity larded with pork and payouts to favored green interests. Included among the “investments” were billions to subsidize a national EV charging network in an effort to jump-start the sale of electric vehicles. The Biden White House insisted the program would fund 500,000 EV chargers by 2030.

As is typical of government infrastructure projects today, the program became bogged down in bureaucratic minutiae. Democrats larded the grant requirements with all types of woke nonsense dictating, among other things, where the stations had to be built and who would be allowed to build them. At a Senate hearing last year, a Federal Highway Administration official testified that, after three years, the effort had produced seven charging stations and a “few dozen” charging ports, Reuters reported.

A year later, that number has increased. But the result remains underwhelming. The National Review reported last month that “the Biden administration’s program will have cost approximately $19.5 million per charger once the funding dries up in 2026.”

A recently released report from the Government Accounting Office concluded that the joint office set up by the Department of Energy and Department of Transportation to oversee such projects “generally does not have fully defined performance goals for its activities and, consequently, is generally unable to use the performance information it collects to assess progress toward goals.”

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February directing states to stop spending the Biden money allocated for EV chargers. This is a step forward for fiscal sanity, given the program’s dismal record. The for-profit sector is capable of meeting demand for EV ports — as Tesla has aptly demonstrated. “Private companies have collectively spent billions on this infrastructure,” The Associated Press reported this year. “Industry leaders say that the demand from drivers for EV chargers will propel companies to build more of them.”

And it’s a sure bet that when these companies fund the construction of new stations and ports, they’ll do it in a timely fashion — and for far less than $19.5 million per charger.

— The Las Vegas Review-Journal

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U.S. Sen. Cory Booker wants Democrats on Capitol Hill to fight harder against President Donald Trump. And accomplish what, exactly?

During a fiery tirade on the Senate floor, the New Jersey Democrat recently accused his own party of being “complicit” in Trump’s ongoing series of constitutionally questionable power grabs — including withholding congressionally mandated funding; gutting federal agencies created via congressional statute; and using the government to intimidate private industry and universities.

“When will we stand and fight this president?” Booker asked, in remarks directed toward his bewildered Democratic colleagues.

The former Newark mayor was just getting started. “The problem with Democrats in America right now, is we’re willing to be complicit to Donald Trump … when we have all the leverage,” Booker, 56, said a few minutes later. Plus: “The Democratic Party needs a wake-up call … It’s time for Democrats to have a backbone, it’s time for us to fight.”

For frustrated Democratic voters, Booker’s comments are probably cathartic. There’s a reason these voters think so little of their party, contributing to its historically low approval ratings.

Except that Booker’s diatribe was misleading. The Democratic Party doesn’t occupy the White House and controls a minority of seats in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Conservatives enjoy a 6–3 supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court. The only leverage available to Democrats in Washington is the Senate filibuster, a product of chamber rules (not the Constitution) that requires most — but not all — bills to garner the support of 60 senators to pass.

So, Booker might be right that Democrats lack backbone. But that doesn’t change the fact that Democrats don’t have the numbers in Congress, or the highest court in the land, to stop Trump from stretching the bounds of executive authority.

“You have tons of internet (and) social media voices screaming that if Democrats would only fight, they’d achieve A, B, or C. Those people either don’t understand how Congress works, can’t count, or are opportunists misleading people,” Brian Rosenwald, a scholar in residence at the Partnership for Effective Public Administration and Leadership Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “Yet, it shapes the base’s expectations to think that Democrats can achieve more than is possible.”

Beyond the politically titillating nature of Booker’s criticism of his own party, his speech attracted attention because it sparked a real-time public debate with fellow Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

The backdrop to all of this was a package of bipartisan bills aimed at bolstering local law enforcement. Booker was already on record supporting the legislation, and Klobuchar and Cortez Masto were on the floor pushing for passage. Both sharply rebuked Booker. Their argument, essentially, was that Democrats should govern where common ground with Republicans was possible to avoid penalizing their constituents for Trump’s sins.

“I have been equally vociferous in taking on this administration. But all of these bills came out of the (Senate Judiciary) Committee unanimously and I think they deserve that support on the floor,” Klobuchar responded. (She listed the package’s benefits, including funding for mental health services for law enforcement; combating sexual exploitation; boosting police recruitment; and aiding families of officers killed in the line of duty.) Ultimately, Booker dropped his procedural objection and the bills passed.

Now, Booker does have one point. The Trump administration is withholding congressionally mandated funds, rendering the legislative branch’s Article 1 powers meaningless.

“Democrats and Republicans used to stand up for their turf,” Booker said in defense of his initial objection. In other words, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle used to jealously guard the prerogatives of the legislative branch — the supreme branch, according to the Constitution — against overzealous presidents. And they used to do so even when their party held the presidency. The erosion of congressional power is an unfortunate development that predates Trump.

Booker is hardly the first senator to complain that his powerless party had the power to stop the opposition party’s president, if only it had the will to fight. In 2013, I was a Capitol Hill reporter and witnessed Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas deliver an old-fashioned talking filibuster that lasted 21-plus hours — not unlike the record-long Senate floor speech Booker belted out this past spring. And like Booker’s lament that his party has (supposedly) rolled over for Trump, Cruz back then jabbed at Republicans for insufficiently standing up to President Barack Obama.

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Cruz wanted to bring Congress to a standstill by engineering a government shutdown in a bid to defund Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act. But Republicans did not have the power to follow through, despite controlling the House of Representatives — more than Democrats have going for them today.

But Cruz’s quixotic effort did succeed in a couple of ways.

It gave grassroots Republicans the false impression that the GOP could achieve more, legislatively, than was possible through sheer fortitude. It also turned Cruz into a leading 2016 presidential contender, propelling him to victory in the Iowa caucuses. Perhaps Booker, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, is a student of recent history.

Nothing wrong with Booker casting an eye toward 2028, but it might behoove Democratic voters to stay focused on the next election — 2026. Impeding Trump’s agenda requires capturing at least one house of Congress. Doing so would give Democrats some actual — versus imagined — leverage, empowering them to achieve more than emotional catharsis.

David M. Drucker is Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”

“The New York region’s most critical challenges, from economic inequality to the housing affordability crisis, all converge in the subterranean chaos of Penn Station.” 

The LIRR entrance at Penn Station. (Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Office)

What does something as particular as the number of escalators at Penn Station have to do with exorbitant rents in Brooklyn, astronomical property taxes in New Jersey, or the cost of groceries in Queens? What does it have to do with the spread of chain stores and empty storefronts replacing neighborhood institutions, families being priced out of their homes, or the region’s painfully obvious malaise?

It seems like a strange question, but the answer is: everything. The New York region’s most critical challenges, from economic inequality to the housing affordability crisis, all converge in the subterranean chaos of Penn Station. 

It is the dysfunctional heart of our circulatory system—a place where Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road, and New Jersey Transit collide not in a coordinated symphony of movement, but in a grinding, inefficient mess. To be swept into its currents during rush hour is to experience a metropolitan region at its breaking point, choked by its own success and seemingly out of space.

This daily ordeal is more than just a commuter’s headache; it’s the most visible symptom of a profound structural failure. A region’s ability to grow, create jobs, and house its people affordably—its very scalability—is not defined by an ever-taller skyline, but by the relationship between transit expansion and land use. That necessary symbiosis, however, is being ignored due to a failure of public imagination.

Today, too many people and businesses want a piece of New York, but there’s not enough of it to go around. This isn’t a simple supply-and-demand equation; it is the direct result of clinging to an obsolete regional model.

So what does this mean for Penn Station? It means the station is both the problem and the solution.

The New York City region, for all its immense scale, is fundamentally monocentric. In the 21st century, this is a crippling limitation. To successfully absorb growth, other global cities have become polycentric, developing multiple cores for business and culture. This, in turn, has activated new residential neighborhoods in areas previously cut off from convenient transit and metropolitan life.

New York, however, maintains only one true center: Manhattan, with Midtown as its undisputed Central Business District. Why? Because Midtown is the only place that offers access to the entire regional labor market. The premium that companies pay for a New York address is for the ability to hire from a talent pool of 21 million people, drawing from every neighborhood and suburb across three states. 

This unparalleled access is possible only because Midtown is the singular point where virtually every transit network converges. That makes it the region’s greatest asset, and its greatest vulnerability. Midtown is finite. It cannot expand, and new construction is only feasible at astronomical rents that fuel the region’s inflationary cycle.

What makes an apartment in the city or a house in the suburbs desirable? Access. Proximity to the region’s economic engine is paramount. With only one core, we are squandering the scalability that other global cities have already embraced.

No region is an island, even if that island is Manhattan. (ReThinkNYC)

This is not an unsolvable problem. Our global competitors, London and Paris, faced similar crises of hyper-concentrated historic cores straining under the weight of their own growth. Their solution was not to accept these limits but to embark on systemic transformation by investing in high-capacity, through-running rail networks.

Both Paris and London are still painfully expensive cities, where generational residents compete with economic and demographic pressures. But unlike New York, these cities have critically utilized their surrounding regions with integrative transit and land use expansions. Thanks to things as technical as through-running, adaptation of a polycentric model, and the metroisation of their commuter railroads, these cities have expanded not just their raw housing supply, but vast areas that are connected to their value propositions.  

As a result, residents in Paris and London have the option to live in countless neighborhoods that a generation ago were nowhere as desirable or convenient. This has leveraged abandoned lots, parking lots, and certain obsolete industrial zones as places where housing can be built. And the immediate and long term result is that rents have stabilized, and while both Paris and London remain stubbornly expensive, they are not seemingly stuck in an inflationary cycle like the New York region.

Paris pioneered this model with its RER (Réseau Express Régional), which unified disparate suburban commuter lines by tunneling them through the city center. This allowed for a high-frequency, regional metro system that dramatically increased accessibility across the metropolis. Paris could now preserve its historic core while concentrating growth, housing, and new business districts like La Défense in well-connected suburban nodes. 

London also pursued this strategy, first with the Thameslink Programme and more recently with the Elizabeth Line. By connecting commuter rail from the east and west through a massive new central tunnel, the Elizabeth Line has drastically cut commute times, making distant towns like Reading and Abbey Wood newly viable and spurring significant housing development. 

These are not just infrastructure projects, but strategic interventions designed to distribute opportunity and fundamentally address housing affordability. How is applying this to New York City dependent on Penn Station? Because Penn Station already is physically, but not operationally, a through-running station that, if unlocked as such, could free New York City and the region from the current monocentric congested reality.

Currently at Penn, as an operationally terminating station, trains must slowly enter, unload, and painstakingly reverse out. This model fundamentally caps capacity, acting as a dam that restricts the flow of the entire regional transit network. It also prevents other locations along the region’s portion of the Northeast Corridor, like Newark or western Queens, from receiving trains from all the regional networks.  

Obviously coordination between the transit agencies would be required to begin through-running, but there’s also a real physical bottleneck at Penn Station that prevents it from bearing the same fruits as the RER, Thameslink, or the Elizabeth Line.

Penn’s barely legal platforms feel crowded even
when they are empty. (Sam Turvey)

The constraint that dictates the station’s low capacity is surprisingly mundane: its platforms are dangerously narrow and they cannot physically accommodate the number of escalators and stairs required to rapidly move thousands of passengers. 

This leads to excessively long “dwell times”—the period a train must sit idle at the platform while passengers slowly file off and on. These long dwell times are the absolute limiting factor for the entire system. They create a hard ceiling on Penn Station’s ability to operate as a through station. If this problem was somehow solved, we could lay the foundation to a scalable polycentric region.  

So that’s how the escalators at Penn Station limit the ability of the region to absorb the demographic and economic forces that are straining it. The symptoms of this we all know now too well. It’s at this confluence between problem and solution, concentrated at Penn Station, where a transformative transit plan becomes the most powerful land use and housing plan imaginable. 

As RethinkNYC Chairperson Sam Turvey detailed in City Limits almost two years ago, by re-engineering Penn Station as a high-capacity, through-running hub—as envisioned in ReThinkNYC’s Regional Unified Network (RUN)—we don’t just get less crowded escalators. We engineer a “leapfrog” that fundamentally expands the entire region’s capacity, following the proven model of our global peers. And this is largely done with the existing infrastructure of the Northeast Corridor, and the already initiated Gateway Plan’s two new tunnels underneath the Hudson River.

The word “leapfrog”  is actually very important. There are several plans in the region being circulated to increase the amount of housing units. Most prominent is the Eric Adams administration’s “City of Yes.” Taken together, these proposals would, if implemented aggressively, add roughly 200,000 units.  

But all these housing plans fall short. They are a magnitude off from what is really needed. A leapfrog is required, where a plan doesn’t just tweak zoning for marginal gains (not to mention eroding historic preservation). It also has to be regional, not just constrained in any one municipality or state. And it cannot just focus on housing in a vacuum. It must be supported by transit.

While a plan like RUN may not seem to be about housing at first glance, it is fundamentally a strategy for survival. It insists that the goal of spending billions on infrastructure cannot be merely shaving a few minutes off a commute; it must be to alleviate the crushing demand placed on the entire region. 

The cost of inaction is dire, and it is measured in human terms: in the families forced to leave, the small businesses that can no longer afford rent, and the young people who see no future here. To suggest that a through-running solution can wait until 2080 (as mentioned last year by the railroad agencies) is to accept defeat. It is to condemn two more generations to a region that is actively hostile to their aspirations. 

This is not just a policy failure; it is a moral failure. The choice before us is clear: we can continue to apply small fixes to a fundamentally broken model, or we can make the bold, strategic investment in our infrastructure that unlocks a more equitable, affordable, and sustainable future for all. Penn Station is the key, and the time to turn it is now.

Cezar Nicolescu is a board member at ReThinkNYC and the senior urban designer at ReThink Studio. He holds a MS in architecture and urban design from Columbia University.

Jim Venturi is the vice chairperson of the board of ReThinkNYC, the founder of ReThink Studio and the key thought-leader behind the RUN proposal.

The post Opinion: Penn Station is the Key to Solving New York’s Housing & Affordability Crises  appeared first on City Limits.