Tracks Bar Returns to Penn Station

After seven years away, Tracks Raw Bar & Grill is back where it belongs — on the Long Island Rail Road concourse at Penn Station.

We’re proud to have designed it.

The original Tracks opened in 2003, tucked between the LIRR ticket windows and Tracks 18 and 19. For sixteen years it was a beloved establishment for commuters, sports fans, and residents alike. It was also something more unusual than that. Over the course of this project, person after person told us the same thing: Tracks was one of the few places in the city where white collar and blue collar drank at the same bar. Conductors and commuters, trades and traders, everyone heading east.

It closed in 2019 when the MTA began renovating the LIRR concourse, and the owner, Bruce Caulfield, moved the operation above ground to 31st Street while he waited for a way back.

The new space occupies the same location it did before, and it still has one of the longest bars in the city with 36 bar seats. Our task was not to reproduce the old Tracks, and not to replace it either. It was to reinterpret a well-loved room in a way that introduces it to a new audience while staying true to what made it work. The architecture takes its cues from the language of train design — curved forms, repetition, the rhythm of a carriage — and provides displays for Bruce’s own collection of railroad memorabilia, accumulated over decades.

The hardest constraint was overhead. Structural beams bring the ceiling down to 7’2″ in places. This constraint required creative solutions to fit all the services and made the lighting design essential to create ambiance. Much of the design effort went into making that height feel intentional rather than imposed — using the low datum as part of the club-car logic rather than fighting it.

The reopening on September 17th drew MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber, LIRR President Rob Free, and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who marked the occasion by naming the day Tracks Appreciation Day in Manhattan. The opening was covered by Bloomberg and the New York Daily News.

It was a good reminder that a bar in a train station is never only a bar. Penn Station is in the middle of a long argument about what it should become. A room where everyone passing through feels equally welcome is a small, concrete answer to that question.

This is our second project with Tracks, following the Grand Central Madison location that opened in September 2025.

Tracks is open now on the LIRR concourse, near the Seventh Avenue entrance.

Go have an oyster.