Lost in Penn Station

I was supposed to go to New York for work with a couple of work colleagues, and I was walking through Penn Station with them. We were in a hurry - in my head, I was thinking that we were going to miss the train from Princeton to New York (even though we already were in New York). Even though I was a daily commuter through Penn Station for 5 years, things looked familiar but confusing to me now. I took them down a set of stairs to what I thought would be the lower level, only it went down directly to the tracks, and instead of being full of other train riders waiting for the train, it was full of homeless people, people just loitering, drinking, and doing drugs. Instead of walking back up the stairs to back track, we thought we could cut through to a staircase we saw down the line that lead out to the street. However, in order to do so, we had to step over homeless people, squeeze past scary looking men hanging out on the steps, etc. Nobody really harassed us that bad, though some dodgy people tried to talk to us. When we got outside, I saw it had put us out on 37th Street, about 4 blocks north of the main Penn Station entrance. Again, the city streets there looked completely different than what I was expecting.