When wandering through New York City, you're bound to miss more than you think. As tourists often complain, this place can be like sensory overload. 

Movie location scout and the brains behind Scouting New York, Nick Carr, dedicates his time to exploring what often goes unnoticed throughout NYC-- and he's thankfully identified an edifice that most all of us have passed by and probably never even batted an eye at. 

 At 242 West 31st Street in Manhattan stands an ominous structure. 

It's pretty huge and kind of sketchy. The windows are barred and blacked out, there is plenty of worrisome signage, parts of it are boarded up, and there's a enormous industrial-looking metal box protruding from one side.

The point is, it's a little weird, but the reality is not what you'd expect. The building is known as the Penn Station Service Building. 

As Carr stated out, "...it actually predates old Penn Station by two years. Built in 1908 and designed by Charles McKim and William Symmes Richardson, it provided coal-generated electricity for trains, along with heat, refrigeration and a variety of other functions."

You might have guessed it, the location is now largely vacant. 

via The Library of Congress

In the future though, according to the Municipal Art Society of New York, it may be “renovated and used for some portion of Amtrak and possibly New Jersey Transit (NJT) back-of-house operations to be facilitated via an underground pedestrian connection to the Penn Station Block.”

Could you imagine that? It would become an evil lair dedicated to help bring people in from New Jersey... 

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