Amtrak and its architects released renderings and details the other day for their Trump-backed, $7 billion to $8 billion, soup-to-nuts, six-year rebuild of Penn Station.
The plans look promising and thoughtful, even if the money and timeline may be optimistic. A vaulted, daylit, stone-and-bronze civic gateway will replace the rats’ maze beneath Madison Square Garden where commuters now scurry for the 5:47 to Ronkonkoma.
Here’s hoping the project moves forward. I don’t see any gilded statues or giant arches. What I do see is a dignified, detailed makeover that should relieve congestion, unlocking more than 100,000 square feet of new circulation space, a big safety upgrade.
Ceilings are spectacularly lofted, sightlines cleared, and an entire level of the station — that claustrophobic one sandwiched between the main concourses and the train platforms — is excised.
Some 100 columns are also removed from those platforms, and more stairs, elevators and escalators added across the station. That should help passengers get on and off trains, exit in emergencies, and allow trains to move in and out of the station more efficiently.
The plan’s big move involves buying and demolishing the 5,600-seat Infosys Theater that the Garden owns, which clings like a barnacle to the underside of the arena at Eighth Avenue. This will make possible a sun-filled, colonnaded, ceremonial new 450-foot-wide entrance down to a train hall with clerestory windows that bring natural light to the other end of the station.
It means that Penn should no longer feel like a crypt, even though the Garden isn’t going anywhere.
Andy Byford is overseeing this effort for Amtrak. New Yorkers may recall Byford fondly. He gained the nickname Train Daddy during a few hopeful years when he ran the city’s subway system, upgrading faulty switches, improving on-time performance and speeding service before falling out with his difficult boss, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Now an adviser for Amtrak, Byford has set an 18-month deadline for shovels in the ground to end decades of inertia at Penn Station.
He told me last week that riders won’t see ticket surcharges. But he added that nothing about the design is yet “set in stone.” The scope of the project — meaning who will pay for it, what costs the developer will cover, and for how long the developer manages the station — all remains to be negotiated.
And as always, the politics are a mess. Did I mention the president?
On cue, New York Democrats, led by Representative Jerrold Nadler, a longtime Trump nemesis, protested the U.S. Department of Transportation’s “lack of transparency” around the selection of Penn Transformation Partners as master developer.
Penn Transformation Partners is a private consortium headed by Peter Cipriano, a former Department of Transportation official during the first Trump administration. Three years ago, Cipriano proposed a public-private partnership agreement, or PPP, as an alternative to what was then the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s hopeless effort to fix the station. PPPs are what got Moynihan Train Hall and the new LaGuardia Airport successfully built.
Cipriano’s plan offered relief for NJ Transit riders — around 170,000 of them each day — not being served by Moynihan, which only really benefits Amtrak riders but made clear that progress was possible.
He enlisted an ambitious and innovative New York architecture firm, PAU, run by Vishaan Chakrabarti, who had worked on various Penn Station redesign proposals, and the global giant HOK, along with Severud Associates, which engineered the Garden back in the 1960s.
This remains, along with Skanska, the construction firm, the core team for the current plan, which refines that 2023 proposal. I touted Cipriano’s concept at the time, despite some undercooked architectural renderings, because it seemed more practical and granular than many pie-in-the-sky offerings over the years and was obviously superior to the M.T.A.’s stalled effort.
Some history is useful here. The M.T.A. at that time was spending hundreds of millions of public dollars redoing a single Penn concourse that serves the Long Island Railroad. What resulted could hardly look more banal. The authority also squandered $74 million on architectural fees for a wider glow-up that failed to win over NJ Transit, Amtrak or the Biden administration.
Even so, the M.T.A. seemed to do everything it could to thwart Cipriano’s alternative. It was a familiar story at Penn Station — regional agencies, authorities, politicians and private billionaires, including James L. Dolan, the owner of the Garden, torpedoing one another’s ideas while leaving riders with the dumpster fire of the station.
Then Trump was re-elected. He big-footed the M.T.A. and Gov. Kathy Hochul, instructing his Department of Transportation and Amtrak to stage a competition for a rebuild. Penn is a federal property. Amtrak is the landlord.
We’ll see if Trump’s top-down, red-tape-skirting approach is the abundance agenda in action or another Trump fiasco. But this was a first for the federal government. Amtrak Joe never did much to come to Penn’s rescue.
I detect in Chakrabarti’s new renderings a deliberative search for classicizing forms that tap into modernist precedents like Paul Cret’s venerable W.P.A.-era Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington — but no mindless kowtowing to White House tastes.
Four stone eagles salvaged from Charles McKim’s original station do make it into Chakrabarti’s plan, a nice touch.
Chakrabarti also nods to the layer-cake facade of McKim’s Beaux-Arts post office building across Eighth Avenue, echoing the rhythm of its entablature and colonnade.
The new parabolic train hall takes a page from Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport. Terra-cotta panels and friezes and bronze trim, which will add color and reflect light, variously channel the spirits of Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, Raymond Hood’s Rockefeller Center and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central.
It’s a much warmer, friendlier version of the 2023 design, not radical or reactionary, not Grand Central either, but strategic for weaving New York allusions into a site that remains a battleground and crucible for preservationists.
And while the Garden will still squat above the station like an aged silverback gorilla, the proposal clads the arena’s exterior in Deco-tinged finials echoing the telescoping columns on Eighth Avenue, bringing visual order and calm to what has long been a cluttered, miserable corner of the city.
I’ve floated pipe dreams to fix Penn Station over the years, several of which imagined moving the Garden, one of them Chakrabarti’s provocation to gut the Garden. In an ideal world, through-running is also a logical fantasy, so that trains could travel between New Jersey and Long Island without having to stop and turn around in the station.
Penn Transformation Partners’ plan doesn’t preclude any of these things from happening. It is a partial but major step forward.
The perfect has long been the enemy of progress at the nation’s busiest transit hub. North of 600,000 commuters now depend on Penn Station each day — more people than use all three major New York-area airports combined. Many billions more tax dollars have been allotted to renovate those less-trafficked airports, which cater to a more affluent demographic, than would be pledged to Penn Station.
Fixing Penn can have ripple effects beyond the neighborhood and across the region. NJ Transit presently owns 8,000 acres near its train stations where housing and other new development can be built. Gov. Mikie Sherrill is now talking about doing just this.
As for Trump, older New Yorkers might remember a cautionary tale from the 1990s when Representative Nadler opposed a plan to bury an elevated section of the West Side Highway and in its place give New York an unobstructed new 22-acre riverfront park.
The plan was endorsed by community organizations — but Nadler believed it would benefit a luxury development by a New York developer named Donald J. Trump.
So he persuaded Congress to withhold funding. The burial and park, he told The Times, was “just to help Mr. Trump’s project, and that clearly is just wrong.”
Mr. Trump’s development did just fine without the highway’s removal.
New Yorkers ended up the losers.
