There are train stations. And then there is Grand Central Terminal. It stands alone as the royal palace of American railroads. A cathedral to transportation and industry. A living monument to vision and ambition and hope. Once the home of the New York Central System and now Amtrak and MetroNorth and the Metropolitan Transit Authority, there is nothing quite like it.

The Hudson-Bergen Light Rail is a mass transit railroad that runs along the New Jersey side of the Hudson River from Bayonne to North Bergen. Many of the stations on the line feature partitions made of glass brick. On one particular sunny day, white doing some photography at Hoboken’s historic Lackawanna Terminal, I noticed how objects were distorted when viewed through the thick glass.

I live in Jersey City. For most people, it is a place synonymous with urban blight. Once a bustling hub of ships and trains — think Elia Kazan’s masterpiece On The Waterfront — Jersey City rapidly declined from a gritty maze of factories and warehouses and cobbled streets and railroad tracks to a tired and foreboding accumulation of detritus lurking in the shadow of the majestic skyscrapers of Manhattan. But in the last quarter-century, all that has changed.