Plan B for Fixing Penn Station Would Wrap Madison Square Garden in Glass

A yr and a part after Gov. Kathy Hochul championed a plan to lend a hand fund the renovation of Pennsylvania Station by way of permitting the development of as much as 10 towers across the transit hub, that proposal has been mothballed, and another undertaking has emerged as a imaginable front-runner to interchange it.

The proposal from a subsidiary of the Italian company ASTM Group calls for the development of an oblong glass station round Madison Square Garden. The Garden could be lined in aluminum and metal, and two new light-filled educate halls would exchange the notoriously cramped and darkish station — all of which might be finished by way of 2030, the company has stated.

With the preliminary plan all however useless and builders now scrambling to fill the void, key legislators and civic leaders say the ASTM proposal is one they’re now significantly bearing in mind.

The plan has piqued their hobby for a lot of causes. It has the good thing about now not being tied to income from the flagging administrative center tower marketplace. It does now not require the whole demolition or relocation of Madison Square Garden. It is being pitched by way of outstanding other folks in infrastructure and govt, and it comes to design paintings by way of the structure company that codesigned La Guardia Airport’s broadly lauded Terminal B.

Ms. Hochul, who has indicated that she is open to choices to the state’s partnership with Vornado Realty Trust — the company anticipated to guide redevelopment across the station — has now not publicly weighed in at the new proposal. The governor isn’t obliged to select another proposal, and Vornado officers say they hope to proceed with their settlement. While the Vornado plan has been deserted in the non permanent, it might be revived if financial stipulations reinforce.

At the similar time, Ms. Hochul has begun weighing fallback choices and has stated she is going to have the ability to redo Penn Station without or with Vornado. A spokeswoman for Ms. Hochul declined to remark.

The scramble to seek out another plan to fund an overhaul of Penn Station was extra urgent in February after Vornado pumped the brakes at the undertaking, mentioning financial uncertainty attributable to the pandemic.

Steven Roth, Vornado’s leader government, stated on a choice with analysts that the possibility of recent development in the town used to be “almost impossible” on account of tight lending stipulations. Revenue from the towers, a part of an 18-million-square-foot proposal reliant most commonly at the leasing of recent administrative center area, used to be to lend a hand fund the as much as $10 billion state percentage of the Penn Station renovation.

The new proposal is being spearheaded by way of two well-connected political operators: Patrick J. Foye, a former leader government of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a former government director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; and Peter Cipriano, a former senior infrastructure adviser to Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary right through the Trump management.

Mr. Foye now works as leader government of ASTM North America, a subsidiary of the Italian infrastructure company that specializes in public-private partnerships, and Mr. Cipriano is the gang’s senior vice chairman.

Both males have spent a lot of March advertising their proposal to elected officers and civic leaders in the Penn Station house, and MSG Entertainment, which operates the Garden, stated it’s open to the plans, in step with resources conversant in the talks.

“As we’ve said, we are always open to discussions,” stated an MSG spokeswoman. “As invested members of our community, we are deeply committed to improving Penn Station and the surrounding area, and we continue to collaborate closely with a wide range of stakeholders to advance this shared goal.”

To construct a grand, street-level front for the brand new Penn Station, ASTM would demolish the Theater at MSG, a 5,600-person venue close to the Eighth Avenue aspect of the complicated. The Madison Square Garden area itself could be surrounded by way of a kind of 90-foot-tall glass podium designed to reflect the scale of the Beaux-Arts-style James A. Farley Building around the avenue.

Inside, the Eighth Avenue corridor would have 55-foot ceilings above the brand new passenger concourse and a mixture of retail and ready spaces and in all probability a homeless outreach middle. All 21 tracks could be obtainable from the brand new halls, with further staircases, elevators and escalators.

A brand new mid-block educate corridor, which might abut an administrative center development at 2 Penn Plaza, could be wrapped in a 100-foot-tall glass enclosure, making a sunny arcade for pedestrians transferring between West thirty first and thirty third Streets.

“Our team has developed a game-changing plan to fully deliver on Governor Hochul’s new vision for a reimagined Penn Station that is iconic, spacious, accessible, and full of light and air,” whilst making improvements to capability, a spokesman for ASTM stated in a remark.

ASTM has stated its charge projection might not be able till June — when it were making plans to unveil the proposal — however has argued the undertaking will charge considerably not up to the unique plan. Proponents of the brand new proposal upload that it will now not save you Vornado, which might stay a big landowner in the Penn Station district, from creating the realm in the longer term.

The corporate and its fairness companions would pay for the in advance prices of development and any charge overruns. They would then organize and perform the station for 50 years, in step with other folks conversant in the proposal. Amtrak, which owns the station, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New Jersey Transit, its greatest customers, would pay off ASTM through the years, depending on their very own capital assets in addition to federal finances.

“Amtrak looks forward to hearing more from ASTM and their proposal for Penn Station as part of the project development process for Penn Reconstruction,” stated a spokesman for Amtrak.

ASTM has retained HOK, the structure company that codesigned La Guardia Airport’s broadly lauded Terminal B. The undertaking’s supporters were circulating a 32-page slideshow with HOK’s renderings of the brand new Penn Station, which one recipient shared with The New York Times.

The proposal is gaining momentum.

Richard Ravitch, a former lieutenant governor of New York, stated he advised Ms. Hochul to undertake it right through a lunch assembly in February, two days after Vornado said it used to be halting maximum of its plans for the Penn district. Ms. Hochul appeared “open” to the proposal, he stated.

The plan has already received improve from State Senator Leroy Comrie, the chair of the committee on companies, government and commissions and a vocal critic of the prior plan. It is unclear what, if any, formal approvals this proposal will require.

“I did like the plans that I did see,” Mr. Comrie stated. “They were detailed, and I think they can quickly get approval so we can get the federal funding.”

State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose district comprises the realm round Penn Station, additionally seen the presentation and referred to as it “intriguing,” in phase on account of the involvement of HOK.

The demolition of the Theater at MSG would release considerable room for the educate hub beneath, which is crowded with structural columns that disrupt the passage of commuters, stated Elizabeth Goldstein, the president of the Municipal Art Society, a nonprofit preservation workforce that used to be briefed at the plans. The workforce supported a similar overhaul of the educate station in 2014.

But it will now not resolve all the station’s issues, Ms. Goldstein stated. The plan doesn’t upload educate capability, nor does it deal with congestion problems at the Seventh Avenue aspect of the station, the place pedestrians go out the subway, she stated. Historically, maximum passengers have entered the station from the east, now not the west, despite the fact that redevelopment of Manhattan’s Far West Side would possibly regulate that.

The plan may additionally run into opposition from the M.T.A., which Ms. Hochul controls, however the place the executive government, Janno Lieber, exerts robust affect. “We look forward to a full briefing on these concepts,” stated John J. McCarthy, the authority’s leader of exterior members of the family. “However, we remain concerned that the proposal, as described so far, lacks key elements of the master plan agreed to by Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and M.T.A. — especially the introduction of natural light and major new entrances on the Seventh Avenue side, which serves over 70 percent of M.T.A. customers at Penn Station.”

A spokesman for New Jersey Transit stated the company seemed ahead to finding out extra in regards to the proposal. “Our primary focus is ensuring that any plan meets the needs of New Jersey Transit customers today, and the capacity demands of tomorrow, through both the renovation and expansion of Penn Station New York,” he stated in a remark.

Some critics are skeptical of the ASTM financing construction. John Kaehny, the manager director of Reinvent Albany, a watchdog workforce, stated that public-private partnerships don’t seem to be essentially probably the most cost-effective path, as a result of governments usually have get right of entry to to decrease rates of interest. The charge of capital for such partnerships “is always going to be higher than the government’s,” he stated.

But Penn Station, the proponents’ argument is going, is an surprisingly Balkanized area. Its many customers — Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Rail Road and, quickly, Metro-North Railroad — constitute a number of camps which are regularly in struggle with one every other.

While different proposals to rebuild Penn Station were floated, maximum are contingent at the demolition of Madison Square Garden, which sits on most sensible of the labyrinthine educate hub, has deep political connections and can strongly face up to any transfer.

Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, stated the brand new proposal circumvents that drawback. “This shows that it’s possible to build a really great station that works for commuters without moving the Garden,” he stated.