If you’re scratching your head over the latest news about two duel plans to restore New York’s Pennsylvania Station, you’re not alone. Various officials I have spoken to are also vague about the details.
The only thing anyone seems to know for sure is what, despite decades of demands and promises, will make sense to improve North America’s busiest and most miserable rail hub. is not happening. Hope had long been destined to die at 6:50 on the way to Secaucus.
However, it may actually be different now.
why?
First of all, because a very detailed, and at the moment clearly superior, but informal proposal suddenly emerged as an objection to the proposal that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had been slowly putting together. At the very least, a new offer from a private infrastructure development firm called ASTM North America may be the disruption needed to get Albany going.
ASTM’s six-year, $6 billion plan, outlined to civil servants and widely reported last week, will transform the cramped and convoluted station owned by Amtrak with high ceilings and wide corridor gratings that bring in sunlight and dignity. It will be reconfigured into a single concourse. And circular logic takes the place of the mouse maze beneath Madison Square Garden. Outside of the station, a new porous stone façade with manicured terraces and rows of pillars is an architectural waste that New York squandered in the 1960s when McKim, Mead & White’s original Penn Station was demolished. To some extent, it will restore sensibility and civic symbolism. .
Unlike many other plans to date, this one does not involve relocating the gardens. Unfortunately, that dream died in the form of Betamax and Blu-ray. Instead, ASTM surrounded a drum-shaped arena inside a square podium and filmed reconstructing the street walls and partial footprint of the old train station.
The soaring entrance of the new 8th Avenue is framed by a row of syncopated columns that subtly evokes the old train station and its opposite Beaux Arts sister building, the James A. Farley Building, and the 55-foot-tall new Continue to the station. A map of the city’s streets is embossed on the high railroad hall ceiling. To build the hall, ASTM bought (reportedly somewhere in the $500 million south) and demolished the Madison Square Garden theater that clings across the sidewalk to the west side of the arena, and has spent decades Over time he builds what used to be two buildings. A block dead zone along 8th Avenue.
The ASTM team includes Severud Associates, the garden’s longtime engineer, and PAU, two architectural firms based in New York and run by Vishaan Chakrabarti, who has worked on various garden designs for many years. renovation planand HOK, which oversaw the new Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport.
For now, I’ll leave the validity of the $6 billion figure and the ASTM guarantees of overage coverage to others. Cost aside, there’s a lot to admire here. Among other things, the plan prioritizes surrounding roads and sidewalks, solves the problem of very uncomfortable back rooms, including Amtrak storage and garden loading docks, and ultimately the commuter space. depends on the design of Drawing inspiration from such noble precedents as Grand Central Terminal and Berlin’s Schinkel Old Museum, this early stage of his ASTM architecture is a bit rigid and self-serious, but he says it’s a fitting gateway to New York and the world. It clearly communicates a very important point. The millions of working people who depend on it need to offer more than high ceilings, easy-to-understand signs and warm bagels. It needs to be a source of national pride.
For the time being, however, the official master plan is in charge of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, not ASTM or anyone else. You may remember that the Moynihan Train Hall opened in the Farley Building in early 2021. With skylights and Tennessee marble, the building quickly became a focal point in the midst of the pandemic, a bright spot in the city and a reminder to New Yorkers what grand public spaces can be like. But Moynihan could not serve more than a fraction of the more than 600,000 commuters who languish at Pennsylvania Station every day. The task of restoring Penn, therefore, involved the already overburdened MTA, FXCollaborative, WSP, and the British architect John McCaslan, who had successfully renovated King’s Cross Station in London, the closest station to Penn Station. entrusted to a team of designers and engineers including
This was pretty much the situation when my colleagues Dana Rubinstein and Stefanos Chen broke the news this spring that ASTM had been incorporated into the problem. When I spoke with MTA officials last week, they said they were on track to release full details of their promised plans next summer, a year from now. Current project budget estimates exceed $7 billion. All the design and financial details are still on the table, they said. Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, which share stations with the Long Island Railroad and the New York City subway system, would eventually agree to the MTA’s proposal.
or not.
are you still with me
During the next year, the MTA, either on its own or under pressure from Gov. Kathy Hochul, other politicians and railroad partners, may make decisions, such as ASTM or another developer. The project should be taken over as part of a public-private partnership or his P3.
In effect, this was how both the new LaGuardia Terminal and Moynihan were built. The MTA now installs elevators in many subway stations in this way, Access for people with disabilities. The private company responsible for the MTA’s project is Halmer International, a subsidiary of ASTM. Hulmar is also building the Long Island Rail Road’s new Third Railroad.
In this context, I hope Ho-Chol’s reps can shed some light on this strange media event that hastily organized last week — apparently, ASTM’s announcement of the latest drawings and budget in a few days. It seems that it was to make it bigger than planned. The governor’s event took place inside the new Long Island Railroad corridor that runs along the north end of the station, which the MTA has just renovated over the course of several years and at a cost of $700 million. The renovations, including a new conical entrance on 7th Avenue, turned a claustrophobic rabbit den into a large, wide hallway, but the price is astronomical and the architecture is impressive. It was nothing.
Standing next to the governor at the event, MTA Director Jano Lieber showed off some of the latest drawings of the new station created by FXCollaborative. It includes a mid-block train hall in a towering glass concourse that looks like a busy shopping mall to me. in dubai.
After Mr. Lieber’s talk, Ho-chul seemed to distance himself from the paintings. “We’re not here to plan,” she told the crowd. “Everyone has an opportunity to show their vision.”
It was a bizarre set of threads that seemed to reflect not only ASTM’s confusing narrative, the fact that design-wise anything really is still possible, but also the MTA’s dangling state. plan. MTA officials now argue that the grand Eighth Avenue entrance, as envisioned by ASTM, will not accommodate enough commuters to justify public costs. By their calculations, perhaps only his 30% of commuters use the western station. They contend that taxpayers should not reward the Dolan family, who own the gardens, by paying for the theater.
With 30% of the MTA’s estimated number of passengers per day surpassing 680,000 by 2038, Penn Station West would be the nation’s rail station. fourth busiest railway hub. And the west side of it is above the center of the track where riders enter and exit. But never mind. There’s another way to interpret what’s going on here. This involves an entirely different issue, namely the special permits allowed to operate gardens above the station.
Turning the clock back to 2013, the New York City Council responded to growing calls for station renovations by refusing to make the special permit permanent at the garden’s request, instead extending the permit for 10 years. I decided to find a new home Gardens did no such thing.
I think what we are currently seeing in concept drawings by the MTA is partly a negotiating strategy with the gardens. A railroad hall proposal with a giant glass ceiling would require the gardens to abandon the mid-block taxiway and shrink the footbridge that reaches the arena for 80 percent of ticket holders. The MTA appears to be looking to influence board votes this summer. “The Dolans have gotten pretty good deals from New Yorkers so far,” Lieber said. Speaking at the MTA board meeting.. “I don’t want to pay hundreds of millions more into that account right now.”
In other words, ASTM decided to buy Garden’s cooperation. The MTA treats gardens as adversaries.
My guess is that the city council will decide to renew the permit this summer for a limited time, provided the gardens cooperate in some way with the renovation plans for the station and its surroundings. The MTA’s strategy and design may look different once the special permit vote is finalized.
If not, it seems certain that demands on the gardens could spark lawsuits and refurbishments to be contested in court for years to come. And the renovations are funded by federal grants, which require a sympathetic White House administration.
So the clock is ticking.
Even if all this still seems dizzying, the bottom line is that next year will decide the fate of this station. Perhaps not since the demolition of the original McKim, Meade & White building has there been such momentum and a similar alignment of political stars. The problem now is that New Yorkers can put aside the loud and pie demands of rebuilding the original station or revamping the Eastern Seaboard rail network, and finally unite around what is possible. whether or not
Hochul says Pennsylvania Station is a top priority. let her endure.
