Good morning. It is Wednesday. Today we hear from The Times architecture critic about something that would change the look of a well-traveled part of Midtown Manhattan inside and out – a plan for a new Pennsylvania Station.
One reason for that, the main reason, I think, is that the person behind this plan is Peter Cipriano, who runs ASTM North America, an infrastructure development company that’s built a lot of toll roads in Europe and other places.
Cipriano spent at least a few years quietly, behind the scenes, talking to Amtrak, talking to the folks at Madison Square Garden, trying to get a realistic, detailed picture of what it would take to do something with the station without moving it. of the garden itself. And so when our colleagues Stefanos Chen and Dana Rubinstein broke the news that this “other” plan existed, it already had a lot of specificity.
ASTM’s plan calls for buying the theater at Madison Square Garden for one reason and one reason only: to demolish it. That differentiates ASTM from the MTA, which seems to want to treat the Dolans, who own the Garden, as adversaries. Janno Lieber, the chairman and CEO of the MTA, said in April that the ASTM plan was wasteful. What are the chances that the Theater will be demolished?
Everyone is mad at the Dolans for some reason. When Lieber talked about the idea of the cost of buying the theater, he pitched figures of $1 billion or more, but he hadn’t negotiated with the Garden to see what a real price was. Cipriano went and said what it would cost and realized it was a manageable number from his perspective – somewhere around $450 million, it seems.
But ASTM says the plan would be about $3 billion cheaper overall than the MTAs.
Cipriano said the price would be $6 billion and would cover cost overruns.
In the universe to do such a thing, $6 billion is at least a billion short of what the MTA estimates. And the MTA plan will last maybe another year and could go up significantly.
I think we have to be careful until all those numbers are analyzed. It may turn out that Cipriano’s plan isn’t such a good deal for the public. I think we can say that the advent of this proposal by ASTM has helped reshape Penn Station and hold the MTA accountable for coming up with something better.
You said that the MTA plan, as it stands now, looks like a mall in Dubai.
The MTA’s drawings are full of people. You have to assume it’s a bustling place. But the plan is unformed. Those drawings do not reflect the end result of their design, but an early proposal for what they could do.
That was one of the hardest things to understand, which is that you’re not comparing apples to apples when you talk about the ASTM plan and the MTAs.
The MTA has another year, it says, to work out the details of its plan, and it’s clear Lieber and others hope to take advantage of the approaching expiration date of the Garden’s permit to work at that site to see what they can get out of the Garden before they start. to a particular plan.
When I asked what you liked about the ASTM plan, I expected you to talk about how it would make the new Penn Station worth seeing.
The ASTM plan would certainly change the face of Penn Station, which is so disgraceful and disgusting right now. It’s a place people suffer through, they don’t go there. Both ASTM and the MTA understand that the station is so confusing that even native New Yorkers like me have never been comfortable navigating it.
The ASTM plan aims to restore some of the civic monumentality and civic dignity associated with the romance of the old station that was demolished in the 1960s. We haven’t seen that in the MTA plan.
All this is complicated by the administrative layers involved. The permit you mentioned, which allows the garden above Penn Station to operate, is not from the state, which controls the MTA, but from the city council.
Right. There may not be a more complicated, confusing, frustrating site in New York or perhaps anywhere in the country.
It’s bureaucratic hell. You have Amtrak, which owns what’s underground — a federal entity. You have Madison Square Garden, a private company, which owns the arena above it. You have a real estate company that owns property that sits above 2 Penn Station. You have state and city interests above and below ground. And you have New Jersey Transit, which still has an investment in and a say in what happens.
Who’s in charge? In a way, that’s why no one has solved this problem for 60 years.
It’s not just a matter of some New York governor or mayor saying, “We’re going to fix this.” There are so many interests claiming this site that almost any kind of project can go off the rails. These interests do not necessarily overlap and are often in direct conflict with each other. The question is whether there is sufficient coordination.
Well, is there alignment?
What we’re seeing now is the potential for alignment. A small chance.
The funding is very demanding on the federal government, and that requires an administration that is benevolent about spending on these kinds of projects in New York. The Trump administration certainly didn’t appear to be — in 2018, President Trump made it clear that he was against the Gateway tunnel project, which was deemed critical to moving rail traffic across the Hudson River. And who knows how long the Biden administration will be in office.
It’s worth remembering that Amtrak put in $300 million and the MTA spent $700 million repairing one aisle of the station – $1 billion, and the result was largely cosmetic and unimportant. What is needed is something much more thoughtful, integrated and dynamic.
Does the MTA have the bandwidth to run a project like this right now, when it’s looking for congestion charges to provide long-term funding for the transit system it manages? Is a public-private partnership with a company like ASTM possible?
One of the biggest challenges the MTA faces is providing access to hundreds of subway stations for passengers with disabilities. The contract to do several of those stations is with Halmar International, an ASTM subsidiary that has repeatedly praised the MTA as one of its best partners.
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It will be a hot and sunny day, with temperatures around 90 degrees. At night it is usually clear and the temperature will be around the mid 70’s.
ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING
In effect until August 15 (Feast of the Ascension).
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METROPOLITAN Diary
Toll taker
Dear Diary:
Years ago I worked as a summer toll collector on the Marine Parkway Bridge, which connects Brooklyn to the Rockaways.
One night, while working the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am “graveyard” shift, with only one collector in each direction, I witnessed a car drive off the bridge toward my booth.
It was 2 or 3 am, so the car had the bridge and toll plaza to itself when it screeched to a stop next to my cab.
