Penn Station in the wee hours is not for the faint of heart.
Specifically the Long Island Railroad terminal, where small armies gather all day long, waiting for their train from the heart of Manhattan back onto the Island.
That’s exactly where I found myself two weeks ago.
1:30 in the morning.
Saturday had just become Sunday.
On a trek back from Connecticut, backpack slung over my shoulder, stone cold sober.
Waiting on a track announcement for whatever train was going to take me home.
This usually would be a “You couldn’t pay me” scenario.
Ask anybody in the New York Metro area.
They’d tell you to avoid Penn Station at this hour like the plague.
If you couldn’t?
At least make the trek across the street to the $1.6bn, cavernous and modern Moynihan Train Hall, and catch the very same train in peace.
The kind of place New York built because we were collectively embarrassed that Penn Station was the front door to the greatest city in the world.
But there I was, with the biggest smile on my face.
At the risk of sounding like the worst, I had spent my night holed up in a bougie office, strategizing creator stuff, sharpening my AI skills, things like that.
I was literally the cringe embodiment of the “While they’re out partying I’m working bro!!1!!” TikToks.
My late night subterranean friends?
Quite the opposite.
My surroundings were almost comical.
There were throngs of drunk guys and girls who undoubtedly had been using fake IDs to get into wherever it was that inebriated them to this level.
Some guy stumbling over to the NYPD kiosk and asking “what’s the best bathroom to take a piss at?”
…and refreshingly, they were nice to him.
There was an entire group of people in bright yellow shirts speaking a language I couldn’t decipher, they must’ve been at the same show.
Their joy was palpable.
There were also the usual suspects:
Homeless guys yelling at the passerby, girls in the smallest dresses imaginable scarfing slices of Rose’s Pizza, couples arguing, sober shift workers hiding under hats and giant headphones just trying to get home.
Theoretically, this should’ve been annoying as hell.
It was anything but.
I was in the heart of the chaos and loving it.
Slowly, it dawned on me why.
Nobody was curating anything.
That’s exactly what it was.
You could’ve taken a time machine back a decade and seen the exact same behavior.
(Albeit in a Penn Station that still looked like an Eastern Bloc bomb shelter)
The couple having the shouting match outside Raising Cane’s?
I’m sure their social media is filled with paragraphs-long birthday posts for one another.
The girl in the little black dress with half a slice’s worth of cheese dripping off of her face probably gets into the four figures on likes on IG.
“I need police advice on urinating” guy might be a very apt and able guy in his day-to-day life.
Who knows?
That’s kind of the point.
The facades had come down.
I couldn’t mute the homeless guy lecturing to no one at all about doomsday coming.
Couldn’t scroll past the blowout fights or unsee the girl vomiting into the trash can by Track 18.
Penn Station was the anti-feed.
Finally, it was time to head home.
The 1:47 train to Ronkonkoma.
My track was announced, and thus began the final phase of my journey.
Start the Pamplonian stampede down the triple-barreled staircase to the tracks.
Where the f—- is so and so?
Yo, is this even the right train?
Some minor shoving matches between groups of bros.
Of course, this all continued on the ride home.
Screaming, yelling, laughing, joking.
Pretty sure I witnessed a breakup.
Pizza boxes littering the floor.
Raw humanity expressed on a Saturday night in a world where algorithms, branding, and virtue-signaling reign supreme.
The funny thing is, you can’t look out the window of a night train.
The industrial lighting of the train car and the thickness of the windows just leave you with a muddied reflection of your own exhausted self with AirPods in.
That can lead to some heavy moments of introspection.
On this night, though?
My reflection smiled right back at me.
-John Abbate
8/16/2026
The best initiation to the late night LIRR experience is when you're sitting in your seat and smell the vomit coming before it rolls down the floor past you.
Take me back to the real real
The best initiation to the late night LIRR experience is when you're sitting in your seat and smell the vomit coming before it rolls down the floor past you.
Take me back to the real real