A vast pit opens below the viewer, its floor white with snow and crossed by tracks, while clouds of steam billow from machinery in the middle. Dark rock walls and the black bulk of buildings frame the hole, and smoke drifts from chimneys against a deep blue sky streaked with orange cloud. Tiny workers move across the snow, and in the foreground a few figures stand or crouch at a railing on the edge. George Bellows painted the excavation for New York's new Pennsylvania Station around 1907–1908.

According to the Brooklyn Museum, between 1907 and 1909 he completed a series of four canvases devoted to the giant dig. The museum reads the workers as overwhelmed by the pit they are digging, and sees an infernal quality in the scene that suggests the artist's ambivalence about how fast New York was being transformed in the early twentieth century. The canvas is unsigned. The Brooklyn Museum acquired it through its A.

Augustus Healy Fund. The station that rose from this pit no longer exists: it was demolished in the 1960s, and the museum also keeps sculpture salvaged from the building. It is in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.