Located at the intersection of 34th Street and Seventh Avenue in the Midtown neighborhood of Manhattan, it is served 24 hours a day by the 1, 2 and 3 trains.

The station was built by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) as part of the Dual Contracts with New York City, and opened on June 3, 1917.

[7] It was predicted that the subway extension would lead to the growth of the Lower West Side, and to neighborhoods such as Chelsea and Greenwich Village.

[12] A shuttle service ran between Times Square and Penn Station until the rest of the extension opened a year later on July 1, 1918.

[14][15] The new "H" system was implemented on August 1, 1918, joining the two halves of the Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line and sending all West Side trains south from Times Square.

[16] An immediate result of the switch was the need to transfer using the 42nd Street Shuttle in order to retrace the original layout.

[17][18] As part of a pilot program, the BOT installed three-dimensional advertisements at 34th Street–Penn Station in late 1948.

[19][20] The New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) announced plans in 1956 to add fluorescent lights throughout the station.

[41] This is due to the expected increase in ridership and to encourage riders to switch at the next stop northbound, Times Square–42nd Street, as it is set up in the usual island platform manner for cross-platform interchanges.

[43] A wheelchair-accessible elevator is also present on the south side of 34th Street at Seventh Avenue, within Penn Station's LIRR entrance.

[44]The main entrance to the Penn Station complex is located on the western end of 32nd Street.

There is also a smaller exit from the station at the southern ends of the platforms that connects with the end of the New Jersey Transit concourse where it meets the Long Island Rail Road underneath the main corridor in the station that connects New Jersey Transit and Amtrak.

[45] By comparison, its sister station on the Eighth Avenue Line is ranked sixth-busiest, with 25,183,869 passengers.

[45] When the Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line station was a shuttle stop before the rest of the South Ferry extension opened, ridership was quite low; in its first year of operation, only 78,121 boardings were recorded.