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By William Finnegan
Pennsylvania Station, in West Midtown, is the busiest exercise station in the Western Hemisphere. It is also a battered and haunted maze. I was there recently with Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect and urban planner who has been preoccupied for decades with the most commonly futile efforts to reach the station. We entered from Seventh Avenue, up a narrow escalator with so little loose area that I winced and ducked. To our left, a guy struggled with a stroller to get up a flight of stairs, lurching step by step toward the street.
“It’s architecture that tells you where to go at an exercise station,” Chakrabarti said. In Pennen, architecture regularly tells you to die. Donuts, Jamba Juice, Krispy Kreme. Three railroads and six busy subway lines converge at Penn Station, but from where we were, it was hard to find your way to one of them. “Here, signaling has been a big problem,” Chakrabarti said. His tone was one of serious fear and educational detachment; He taught at Columbia for seven years, worked as director of urban plans for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Manhattan, runs a global architecture firm, and lives with his circle of family within a mile of Penn Station, through which they are occasionally forced to travel. travel. Chakrabarti is fifty-six years old, tall, with a well-trimmed white beard in the shape of a chinstrap.
Further down, towards the platforms, were more problems: narrow walkways with no panels, cables overflowing from the missing ceiling panels. People slept on the floor, leaning against the columns, surrounded by their broken belongings. even the New Jersey Transit Hall, known as “the hole,” is not crowded. Later, passengers would crowd into the narrow, airless pink and beige area to control lane assignment, signaling a stampede to a lonely escalator. I’m still worried about protection here,” Chakrabarti said. “The very low ceilings and the very messy area are a very bad idea. “The sewer line spilled dirty water into a busy lobby.
How did we get here? The original construction of Penn Station, a masterpiece of fine art, was demolished in the early 1960s, after its owners struck a deal with a developer. Extensive rail operations were left underground. ” Station,” Chakrabarti said. We were in a dingy waiting room near Eighth Avenue. Above, on the roof of the sewer, was Madison Square Garden, a stadium with twenty thousand seats. During construction, loads of large pillars were placed in the station, obstructing the corridors and platforms, turning the entire plaza underground.
This burial came at a time when many Americans, starting with Robert Moses, the unelected official who led New York’s infrastructure priorities for 40 years, believed that the train age was over and that the automobile was the future. In fact, traffic passing through Penn Station had been declining since 1945. But the decline has been reversed, as ridership on commuter lines skyrocketed with the progression of the suburbs. In 2019, Penn struggled to accommodate more than six hundred thousand passengers per day. LaGuardia, Newark Liberty) see only a fraction of that number.
The windowless and filthy anthill of tunnels and tracks has become increasingly crowded, harmful and useless. A long-standing crisis that each and every political leader, from the governor to the last, is forced to denounce. Gob. Kathy Hochul called the station a “hell hole. “His predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, echoed Vincent Scully, the architectural historian, who said, “You entered the city as a god. . . Now we are sneaking away like a rat. Occasional relief efforts were organized In 2021, a spacious new exercise room, named after its champion, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, opened on Eighth Avenue, in a segment of the former main post office, with touches of grandeur meant to evoke the original station. And yet, the new concourse, primarily committed to Amtrak, serves less than ten percent of the besieged station’s passengers.
We headed to street level, in the middle of the block. Above us was the Garden, which is shaped like a drum, mud-colored, perhaps the ugliest grand construction in Manhattan since the demolition of the New York Coliseum (a block monstrosity in Columbus). Circle, designed by Robert Moses). A great L. E. D. The screen showed us sports betting classifieds. ” You know, I don’t like binary solutions,” Chakrabarti said. It’s just that I haven’t noticed a drawing that has shown me something like this.
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Many New Yorkers have come to the same conclusion: Penn Station wants a complete renovation, and the biggest impediment is Madison Square Garden. And so, ten years ago, the New York City Council told the Garden that he was still ten years old. Garden operations require a special permit, and the permit expired in 2013. The owners of the arena, the Dolan family, sought a new license to operate “in perpetuity,” and the Dolans, who pay no taxes on garden assets, a little-known arrangement that charges the town more than $800 million, manage in their dealings with the government. They own, among other vital things, the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, who play at the Garden, and no politician wants to be guilty of driving a local team out of town. But the city council stood firm and voted 47-1 in favor of a ten-year permit. The Times described it as “a type of eviction notice. “The permit expires in July.
The money of the Dolan family came from the patriarch, Charles Dolan, who is now over ninety years old. A Cleveland cable television pioneer, he came to the East in 1952 and proposed to lower Manhattan on cable when hardly anyone knew what that meant. he co-founded HBO, lost HBO and founded Cablevision, which has become one of the largest and most successful cable operators in the country. Dolan has launched, bought or sold a long series of businesses, adding American Movie Classics and 8 regional sports networks. He failed in his attempts to buy the Jets and Red Sox, but stayed with Madison Square Garden and its local groups in 1997.
Dolan and his wife, Helen, had six children and lived on Long Island, first in Massapequa, then more extravagantly in Oyster Bay. The heir apparent. James had nothing to do with his sly, soft-spoken father. He had substance abuse issues, a horrible temper, and a more constant interest in rock and roll than business. Giving him business from the circle of relatives, he once said, “Mostly, it was because no one else was looking for him. “
James was sent to the Hazelden Clinic, sobered up, and in 1995 became the CEO of Cablevisión. Under his leadership, the business prospered and the shareholders were happy; in 2016, a Dutch conglomerate bought Cablevisión for more than seventeen billion dollars. As the owner of a sports team, however, Dolan seemed to please no one. The Knicks, who made the playoffs, started wasting soon after he took over and have since compiled one of the worst records in the league. (The Rangers also entered a naming drought, which remains intact. ) Dolan has been willing to spend on player salaries, but the Knicks haven’t been able to freeze consistently. He approved of bad trades and rarely kept a coach for more than two seasons. He clashed with popular Knicks broadcaster Marv Albert over his complaint of sloppy play, and Albert left the team. Even forced, Forbes once called Dolan “the dumbest owner in the sport. ” He kicked out reporters who disliked him and kicked out at least one Garden fan for yelling “Sell the team!” Sometimes the total arena took over singing, only to be drowned out by the background music. (Dolan, through his representatives, declined interview requests. )
Some of Dolan’s antics are successful in large-format newspapers, but he occasionally appears in the tabloids, where even the Post, which stocks his conservative politics, presents him as the quintessential heel: a billionaire with a silver spoon with an average series. And no idea. Most of the canopy he receives is accompanied by unflattering photographs, with Dolan, who is a pear-shaped five-seven, with jowls and beards in places, regularly hunting angry and self-satisfied in his long shawl marked on his front-row seat in the garden. Occasionally there is also something vulnerable in his expression, which is even more annoying.
Lawmakers had no luck other than enthusiasts who oppose Dolan. Proposals to cancel the arena’s tax exemption have dragged on in Albany for years. Supporters of the proposals tend to be the same officials who call for moving the lawn as a first step in Penn’s renovation, such as state Sens. Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Liz Krueger, who make up districts that come with portions of the Midwest. His inability to convince his colleagues in the legislature possibly has something to do with M. S. G. ‘s lobbying operation. in Albany, which is known for being well-funded and persuasive.
He’s also helping Dolan not be afraid to attack officials who offend him. During the 2020 election season, Rep. Max Rose, a Democrat whose district included Staten Island, asked Dolan to sell the Knicks, “for everybody’s sake. “us, brother. ” Dolan donated the legal maximum to Rose’s opponent, Nicole Malliotakis, and suggested her friends and other NBA owners do the same. Rose lost the election.
President Donald Trump also subsidized Malliotakis and, after the election, she returned the favor by voting against the counting of Arizona and Pennsylvania electoral votes. Dolan and Trump are going back a lot. He and his wife at the time, Kristin, were married at Mar-a-Lapass, as was their son Charles. After Trump withdrew an invitation from the White House to the Golden State Warriors, the NBA champions, because Steph Curry said he didn’t need to attend. , Dolan wrote Trump’s crusade a check for one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.
But Dolan’s most extensive political intervention, the one that every agent in New York seems to be conjuring up as a warning in the fight against Penn, came when Mayor Bloomberg set out to build a new platform-shaped football stadium. above the West Side railing backyards. Bloomberg’s plan to lure the Jets from the Meadowlands, the New Jersey stadium hosting the planned home games, and then lure the 2012 Olympics to New York. Dolan believed that the stadium would create a festival for the garden, which is located a few blocks east of the proposed site. He also objected to the public investment that he would receive. So he launched a high-volume publicity crusade attacking the concept and used his connections in Albany, adding Sheldon Silver, a tough legislative leader (who later went to jail), to block Bloomberg’s plan. Dolan even stepped in and presented the Metropolitan Transportation Authority with nearly double the amount the Jets would pay for backyard rights. The Olympic Games went to London. The stadium was never built.
“AN URGENT CALL FOR CIVIC ACTION”: that was the name of a brochure distributed for a convention at Cooper Union in late January. The event’s sponsor was ReThink Penn Station NYC, one of many nonprofits and networking teams committed to improving Penn. The complexity of the motion can be noted on the sponsor’s website, which proclaims, “We are no longer rebuilding Penn Station. . . We are the visionaries previously associated with Rebuild Penn Station. La confusion is only exacerbated through organizations like the Coalition to Restore New York, which claims to have “unions, corporations, nonprofits and voters united,” but is a super PAC introduced through M. S. G. in 2021.
The first guest speaker on the occasion was Lorraine Diehl of “The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station,” a concise story of Penn and his demise. Diehl recalled wandering around the station as a child, passing through the giant waiting room, in which Farley Granger was chased by police in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train. “Next door was the formal restaurant, originally called Corinthian Hall. Diehl had saved a menu from 1951, when a shrimp cocktail charged fifty cents. sense of opportunity,” he said. Sunlight streamed through the clear windows; it was as if New York was the glamorous center of the world.
In the nineteenth century, before the station was built, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest advertising business in the country, with a budget time only for the federal government. However, its tracks ended, like those of all railroads that reach New York. from the west, in New Jersey, on the banks of the Hudson River. In 1900, 90 million passengers were forced to take ferries to Manhattan.
Thus, Pennsylvania built a couple of tunnels under the Hudson, another 4 under the East River (to join them to the Long Island Railroad, which it also owned), and its monumental station in the 30s, at a price of more than one hundred million dollars in 1910, according to “Conquering Gotham” by Jill Jonnes. The station, designed by Charles McKim, of McKim, Mead
Pennsylvania’s wonderful rival, the New York Central Railroad, enjoyed a less difficult direction to Manhattan, coming from the north without significant bodies of water and gliding down Park Avenue on an insignificant slope to its main station, Grand Central. Its owners, the Vanderbilt family, farmed the East Side around their warehouse, which was called Terminal City. Office towers sprang up nearby, and white-collar workers can walk to work.
Penn Station was more like a fortress, alienated from its neighbors for its grandeur and, perhaps, for a certain distaste of Philadelphians for the petty streets of New York. profit for the company, which carried much of the mail), and built the Hotel Pennsylvania, via the seventh, but in a different way kept somewhat away from the city.
When economic hardship hit the railroads after World War II, New York’s two main stations deteriorated, but vultures arrived in Penn first. The demolition sparked protests, mainly from architects, who opposed what Moynihan called an “act of vandalism. “Their efforts encouraged the architectural preservation movement. The city, despite fierce opposition from genuine real estate developers, passed a law in 1965 to protect historic buildings. all the way to the Supreme Court and the station saved.
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After his imminent death, Grand Central was renovated and investment pouring in. Dozens of restaurants, bookstores, boutiques, bars and delicatessen filled the hallways and balconies. The station, with its cool with a heavenly roof, is now one of the most popular tourist spots. destinations in the city, not to mention the hordes that cross trains and subways. “You say, ‘Let’s have a drink in Grand Central,'” Chakrabarti told me. “No one says that about Penn Station. ” Chakrabarti’s studio, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, has an office near Union Square.
In the debates about Penn Station, there is a return to the station that has been lost. That’s what ReThink Penn Station NYC has in mind: rebuild it, perhaps with a little less expensive travertine and a few trendy touches. But the traffic passing through the station today is much heavier than in 1910, and they are mostly passengers: the relatively few intercity trains are now dealt with in Moynihan. The station needs to be redesigned to move other people quickly, safely and, if possible, painlessly. The basic challenge of the shabby community will not be solved by some other columned fortress. And then, of course, there is the Garden that crushes the season.
Madison Square Garden at the top of Penn is the fourth building to bear the name. The first two were built near Madison Square Park, in 1879, for P. T. Barnum, and in 1890, for Barnum and an organization of tycoons that included Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. This record of impermanence would possibly explain why businessman Irving Felt, who moved the lawn to its current location in 1968, showed little interest in the old giant station he was demolishing. “Fifty years from now, when the time comes to demolish our Center, there will be a new organization of architects protesting,” he said.
In fact, no well-known architect will mourn the loss of this ten-story garbage can. In 2013, after the garden’s operating permit was limited to ten years, the Municipal Art Society commissioned 4 major architectural firms to design a new Penn station. Each performance was more than the last. One featured what gave the impression of an open-air green stadium floating above a transparent locker. Everyone got rid of the garden, some more conscientiously than others: one proposed extending the High Line, parking on the west side, to link the reconstructed station to a new arena a few blocks away. A spouse from Skidmore, Owings
The Garden, it must be said, almost left its position at the top of the station more than once. In 1987, plans were announced to build a new arena between 11th and 12th Avenues, adjacent to the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The old position would be demolished as soon as the new one was ready. That never happened, of course. Projected prices have reached the heap of millions of dollars, and interested parties have lost interest.
Two decades later, Governor Eliot Spitzer introduced another plan: move the lawn one block west to a large, unused area of the old post office. He worked on the plan, “understood natural logic and how it would end up self-funded. “There were many differences between the parties: Dolan wanted to put neon signs on the Corinthian columns of the building and was eager to see the money. however, Spitzer, who once described himself as a “fucking steamroller,” kept pushing. The Garden actually signed a memorandum of understanding with the developers. Then, Spitzer self-destructed in a prostitution scandal, and M. S. G. proceeded with Plan B, which was a beloved renovation of the increasingly deficient quality arena.
In 2016, the Times, taking a step in the midst of a municipal force struggle, tasked Chakrabarti with devising a new plan. The near twist of fate with the post office had left him hopeful about the option of a compromise. Yes, the Dolan own this land, so they have a lot to say about what happens to this land; It’s a terribly old fact,” he told me. “But they went out of their way in 2008.
Chakrabarti’s design was an ambitious example of “adaptive reuse. “Instead of demolishing the Garden, he proposed cutting the “unsightly concrete cladding” from the exterior and replacing it with an explosion-proof glass “double skin”, leaving the sublime metal superstructure in place. The result would be a station flooded with light, with hundred-and-fifty-three foot ceilings and the cheeky columns of old sand rendered useless.
“There are two hundred and sixty-one columns that we think we can eliminate,” Chakrabarti told me, as we walked through Penn. We headed west along a platform, along thick columns, some of which were dangerously close to the edge. If in a wheelchair, you have a bag with wheels, a child in a stroller. . . “He didn’t want to finish his thought.
Recycling the turf skeleton would keep prices low, with fewer structural paints and minimal lane closures. Building an entirely new station, he said, “would be like open-heart surgery on a running patient. “However, his own plan called for a profound transformation of the remaining area. Chakrabarti sought to remove not only the sand, but also the narrow degrees of the festival above us, which had been built to upgrade what he calls the “ancient lace mezzanines hovering over the tracks. “These mezzanines, with their glass brick floors, had painted well and were working again. He pointed to the blackness of the rafters. ” Imagine looking all the way from here,” he said. “You’d be looking at the blue sky. “
The innovations envisioned in Chakrabarti’s plan, in terms of safety, efficiency, capacity, traveler experience, network attractiveness and real estate values, are enormous. of the proposal
Chakrabarti met with state officials and a senior M. S. G. official. to talk about design. But he didn’t paint. Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the Times, called Chakrabarti’s task a “provocation. “
Rarely do we hear the lament that we want another Robert Moses, someone who can do wonderful things. Marc Dunkelman, a public affairs researcher at Brown, notes that the last major infrastructure assignment completed in New York City was the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. At that point, Dunkelman says, the left began to reconsider a central guiding principle of old-guard progressivism: that government can simply improve the lives of ordinary people. That religion now faced widespread distrust of the government, a progression he links, at least in New York. , to Moses’ abuses of power, such as the destruction of South Bronx neighborhoods and the structure of the Bronx Cross Highway.
In York, the decision-making force on public allocations has been dispersed, with the arrival of new agencies, new regulations, new environmental and network review requirements. These reforms, all well-intentioned, have had the effect of extending veto power over any given the allocation of infrastructure to a bewildering array of establishments and individuals. As Dunkelman once said, “Everyone is so tough that anyone can kill them. “The area, virtually free of charge to the city, was cancelled in 1985, for reasons that seem retrospective. Among them was a legal dispute over an environmental review in which the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers was involved in an environmental review. The U. S. Department of Health and Prevention downplayed the potential effect on the habitat of striped bass. .
Dunkelman believes the renovation of Penn Station could have been simpler: “In the old days, they would only make the property eminent of the garden. Pay the guy, avoid football betting, do it. But paying Dolan would provoke outrage, he said: “Think about how angry other people would be. That guy who ruined the Knicks and Rangers is now making billions?No one has the strength for that agreement.
In fact, Eliot Spitzer almost did, as did Andrew Cuomo. In New York’s specific force structure, the governor, sitting in Albany, has more influence over the city’s transit systems than the mayor, adding effectiveness over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Cuomo, who became governor in 2011, had all his flaws, but he took infrastructure seriously. He led an eight-billion-dollar renovation of LaGuardia Airport. He replaced the Tappan Zee Bridge and rebuilt the Kosciuszko. He opened the first stops on the Second Avenue subway line, where the structure had stagnated for generations. He also finished Moynihan Train Hall, another long-standing project.
But when Cuomo tackled the most complicated and vital public works challenge in New York, Penn Station, he blew and blew and kicked. He had a plan, but over the years it seemed less like a plan to fix the station than a real estate deal, and a favor to a political supporter, Steven Roth, director of the Vornado Realty Trust. Ten “super larges” would be built in the community: large buildings, maximum commonly offices, maximum commonly to be erected through Vornado, with the unspecified proceeds being used to revive the complex. Cuomo first announced his plan in 2016, at Madison Square Garden. He did not live on the contribution of the sand to the depressing state of the station.
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The Cuomo and Dolan have a history. Andrew’s father, Mario, previously acted as a representative for Cablevisión after leaving the governor’s office. Andrew won significant political donations from Dolan. This was not unusual. 3rd son. ” In 2015, Percoco resigned as the governor’s deputy executive secretary, under the shadow of a federal corruption investigation, and went to work for James Dolan. Percoco remained on M. S. G. ‘s payroll. for months after he was accused of accepting bribes. He was later convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.
As he contemplated Penn’s renovation, Cuomo would likely have been discouraged by the complexity of building a new station. Alexandros Washburn, an architect and urban planner who was the first president of the development company that built Moynihan Train Hall, told me, “This is the Maximum of Confusing Assets in America. He was referring to the “superblock” comprising the garden, the underground main station and Two Penn. Amtrak owns the station, necessarily each and every one below street level, except for the subway lines, which are owned by the M. T. A. Dolan has the air rights to the maximum of the station. Vornado owns Two Penn. La city determines zoning. Renovation may also take only a decade; unlike LaGuardia or Moynihan, he would not get credits before leaving office.
There is also the question of where to place the new arena. Chakrabarti proposed a location on West Thirty-fourth Street, across from Macy’s, what I heard called “the Hooters site,” after one of the entertainment functions there. The arena, two blocks deep, would be so close to Penn Station that a disused pedestrian tunnel could link them. and Seventh Avenues. La density is good, especially around busy public transport. See Grand Central.
But Cuomo’s Penn Station plan didn’t even move the lawn. When critics asked why, he asked a state-owned company called Empire State Development to produce a quick article concluding that moving the sand and building a new station would cost $8. 5 billion. almost 3 times Chakrabarti’s estimate. The council can simply deliver the lawn with an eviction notice, but it was unclear how seriously the owners would take it. What was clear was that Cuomo didn’t want to disturb them in any way.
Madison Square Garden has been New York’s largest mass entertainment scene for nearly a hundred and fifty years, and for the Dolans it’s a lucrative property. Despite how bad the Knicks are overall, the arena is almost complete for games, even with nosebleed seats infrequently up to two hundred people. The Garden hosts more than 300 events a year and many of its clients come through Penn. Get off the train, find a working escalator (or climb the stairs) and you’ll be there.
Yes, it is the oldest stadium in the NBA. Newer stadiums, such as the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, have freight elevators that can take semi-trucks directly to the field of the occasion. Garden elevators cannot accommodate trendy trucks, therefore, all semi-trucks parked on sidewalks miserable the community and complicating the configuration of occasions. And yet, the exhibition continues. Price fights, rock concerts, political conventions, even the Pope goes there to say Mass when he is in town. Billie Eilish? Madonna, hiking with Bob the Drag Queen?In New York, you’ll place them in the Garden.
Among the less prominent acts to play M. S. G. es Dolan’s vanity band, a blues-rock band known as J. D. Con Dolan at the forefront and an abundant turnover of workers, the band has produced 8 albums, which seem to have sold basically to the circle of relatives and friends. But it opens up for big bands like Jewel and the Eagles, and its members travel by personal jet: the advantages of betting on a singer-songwriter Dave McKenna called in Deadspin “the richest traveling musician in the world”. “Dolan is said to be a student committed to guitar and voice (he has a vocal coach with Lady Gaga) and is pleased to communicate with interviewers about his music, saying he is determined to succeed in the mainstream. Some of his songs have appeared on movie soundtracks, but all of those films were produced through his former friend Harvey Weinstein.
Dolan turns out to regard the Garden as a fiefdom of his own. In 2017, he had Charles Oakley, a retired Knicks star who criticized his management, get rid of the arena during a game; Oakley resisted and was handcuffed. Dolan barred warring parties from entering the Garden and other venues on his corporate property, adding Radio City Music Hall and Beacon Theatre. Lately it excludes lawyers from companies that have clients in litigation opposed to one of Dolan’s corporations: a set of spin-off and reconfigured entities from Cablevision, known simply as M. S. G. The plaintiffs come with disgruntled pension fund executives, alleging non-public transactions in Dolan’s component or mentioning the company’s reckless habit that could have lowered the price of its investments. The list of banned corporations would have more than ninety.
M. S. G. la Security uses facial popularity software to identify other people on its blacklist and kicks them out without refund for paid seats. This practice is aimed at lawyers who know nothing about the cases in question. Kelly Conlon, an attorney, was attending a Rockettes Christmas show party at Radio City Music Hall with her nine-year-old daughter’s troop of scouts when she was confronted and fired. Conlon spent two hours on the streets in the December rain, waiting to bring the women back to New Jersey. “It was mortifying,” he told local television.
Incidents like these, as well as the environmental goosebumps of an entertainment company that employs facial popularity in front of its customers, cannot be good for business. In January, elected officials, along with Rep. Jerry Nadler and seven state and local politicians, wrote a letter to Dolan, protesting the use of facial popularity and reminding the company of its valuable tax break. Dolan has heard these kinds of threats before and doesn’t seem intimidated. Last year, after the city council threatened not to renew M. S. G. ‘s operating license. He sent his own warning. If the permit expired, he said, “MSG could raze the lawn and build some other design on top of Penn Station in its own right. “(Emphasis added to evoke phantasmagorical music). ” Through the operation of law” means, in this context, without discussion. The company was not rejected.
Dolan would arguably be less concerned with day-to-day turf operations than some other project, the structure of a sprawling, functional ball-shaped corridor in Las Vegas called M. S. G. But he would have to be far more stupid than he is, not to mention his duty to his shareholders, to move the garden unless someone makes him too smart an offer to refuse. fix Penn Station? It turns out so.
Last September, Mayor Eric Adams announced he was willing to move the lawn. “The assignment of Penn Station is crucial,” he said. And if that fits with moving Madison Square Garden somewhere else, maybe we’ll help the Knicks win. “He smiled, a joke. ” Therefore, we will be ready to talk to Mr. Dolan and see how he fits into the overall scheme of this area. “After that, the mayor seemed to lose interest. When news of Dolan’s generation of facial popularity reignited the question of whether the turf would get a new permit, Adams dismissed them and said he wasn’t interested in “how he runs his manners inside the lawn. “be. ” I think it’s a wonderful position,” he said. I’m glad he’s here. “
Governor Hochul largely stuck to the plan she inherited from Cuomo, in which the proceeds from Vornado would help repair the station. She also turns out to be cut off from Penn’s problems and, like Adams, perhaps hounded by billionaires like Dolan and Vornado frontman Steven Roth. (Roth is a longtime Trump associate, however, last year he maxed out donations from Hochul’s crusade. The Dolans also provided him with money. ) Hochul gave a speech last summer at an L. I. R. R. renovated. She cruises down Penn, where newly raised roofs, in a domain not under turf, offer some relief to those who employ the “hell hole. ” Her office distributed renderings for further improvements. The designs are contradictory, but the street view shows an overturned truck on a walkway, which is at least a familiar sight. Beyond the truck is a proposed source of sunlight for the station below: a modest A-shaped design between the arena and Two Penn, described by an architect friend as a “broken-ass skylight. ” But the skylight design would require the consent of the Garden, which has a closed traffic lane within the proposed space.
In November, Plan Vornado, with its ten super-large and uncountable billions, seemed to vanish. During a convention call with investors, Roth asked about timing. I didn’t have an appointment. In fact, he said, “headwinds in the existing environment are not at all conducive to bottom-up development. “structuring loans, however, seemed like a surprise to Hochul’s administration. Both sides insisted that Penn Station’s assignment was still pending, but it is difficult to see how this can be true when Vornado obviously can’t borrow a penny. Hochul, in his recent state of the state address, laid out a program of “147 ambitious initiatives. “Penn Station is not one of them.
Amtrak has engaged a leading engineering and design firm to begin designing plans for new tracks, platforms and concourses for the station’s long-term expansion. But it was never transparent that the government sought to fix Penn. New York State has created many state governments to take on the duty of complex government projects over the past century. Penn Station, with its variety of divergent actors pursuing their own interests, has no coordinating authority committed to its reconstruction. Federal investment is available, as part of the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill, and Sen. Charles Schumer has been working overtime to make sure New York gets its share. However, as of last year, it was unclear whether the various agencies operating at Penn Station were ready to submit credible grant applications. Senator Schumer, meanwhile, was asked at a city corridor assembly in January if he thought Madison Square Garden deserved to move. He stopped, uncomfortable. ” I’ll have to answer you about that,” he said.
When “political will” is scarce, can those things be done without a government?Only the Pennsylvania Railroad funded the structure of Penn Station and its tunnels. The same happened with the New York Central Railroad and Grand Central (Old William H. Vanderbilt, who inherited nearly a hundred million dollars, may have given Jim Dolan a run for his rich son’s money. “Let the public curse,” he supposedly thundered. ) But in those years, passenger train was a dominant activity. Today it is a public good.
Sports stadiums are another matter. They are usually privately owned, but they take advantage of gigantic injections of public funds. Governor Hochul recently agreed to invest $600 million in state taxes in a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills. This kind of corporate welfare is a form of politics. , not economics. This is crony capitalism: the winners, who regularly threaten nothing, are already billionaires.
Last year, it seemed for a moment that billionaires could simply help save Penn Station, in the form of developer Related Companies. Related was founded by Stephen Ross (not to be with Steven Roth of Vornado, although both are super-rich octogenarians at the same company). Its leaders approached M. S. G. about moving the arena to a location on Eleventh Avenue, near Related’s flagship property, a dense nest of glass skyscrapers known as Hudson Yards. Necessarily located in the same position where Michael Bloomberg planned to place his football stadium, Hudson Yards only has a finished part. The finished component occupies the eastern component of the sorting yards; the western component, according to the idea, is where M. S. G. I could simply go, perhaps combined with a casino. M. S. G. se walked away from the talks, without publicly acknowledging that he had taken a stand.
Large projects leave behind a trail of failed attempts. Before Bloomberg’s unrealized stadium, there was, in the same location, George Steinbrenner’s unrealized stadium for the Yankees. In the 1950s, another tycoon looking to build the world’s tallest skyscraper, still being diverted through banks. Even Robert Moses had to make several passages to cross the Verrazzano Narrows (bridge?tunnel?bridge?) Before, despite everything, a bridge was built in 1964, said the architect and designer. The Moynihan Train Hall, started under his direction, took twenty-five years to complete.
The concept that public works can only be built in collaboration with billionaires has a kind of defeatist gospel among politicians, who rely on wealthy donors. However, Liz Krueger, chairwoman of the state Senate Finance Committee, told me, “It’s less difficult not to make those deals with real estate partners. You have a tendency to lose more in real estate battles than you win. largely covered through the issuance of government bonds. “If the numbers sound huge, let’s talk about bail bonds: bills over 40 or fifty years old,” he said. “Then it’s not so scary. “
Other public works projects in New York, including the reconstruction of Manhattan after September 11, were financed through bonds. your office. ” It’s not difficult. Moving Madison Square Garden is a bastard compared to what we had to do at the World Trade Center. Chakrabarti spent years working on rebuilding the World Trade Center community as Bloomberg’s director of urban planning for Manhattan. “It’s about building a sports stadium,” he said. Other peoples do it all the time. We’re in New York. He said it as if it meant “very functional. “
But moving an arena in the end is not the purpose, of course. The purpose is a fashionable exercise station. “This is the future,” Chakrabarti said. These are high-speed rail lines that connect all those business centers. “What he’s now looking for, he said, is a facility that attracts normal cyclists from New Jersey and Long Island: “We want transportation staff to return to New York. “
In the three years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of people have left New York, some temporarily, others permanently. Manhattan is believed to have lost two hundred thousand homes alone. With almost forty-five thousand dead from the virus, the economic blow has been hard: more than one hundred thousand jobs have not yet returned. Tourism, the main employer, is slowly recovering. But the hardest monetary blow is the disappearance of travelers.
Nearly 4 million more people used to enter Manhattan’s business districts on weekdays. Now, on average, only a portion of the downtown staff flock to the Array. The entire ecosystems that catered to those other people—shops, delis, bars, restaurants, food carts, nail salons—were crushed, annihilated. The center’s vacuum rate is the highest since the 1970s, when knowledge first became available. Vacancy rates in the retail industry are also high. That Hooters in the thirty-third west? Permanently closed. At night, many streets that were bustling 3 years ago now look and feel deserted.
Remote paintings are here to stay, and travelers can’t be blamed for rescuing. Many trips are expensive, unnecessary and tiring. The number of weekday metro passengers is a third lower than in 2019, and passenger lines experienced similar reductions. A recent report released jointly under the signatures of the mayor and governor called the passenger shortage “an existential challenge to the monetary stability of Metropolitan Transportation. “Authority. ” Janno Lieber, president and CEO of M. T. A. , says the fundamental style will have to change; Instead of relying on the fare box, he argues, public transportation is funded as an essential service, like surveillance or garbage collection.
NJ Transit planners have warned that their ridership may be restored in the early thirties, but the fact is, no one knows. Empire State Development, which happens to exist primarily to produce giant numbers for political purposes, has announced that through 2038, Penn Station and Moynihan will serve about nine hundred thousand passengers per day, an increase of nearly fifty percent above pre-pandemic levels. Perhaps those numbers were meant to attract federal funds.
It is encouraging that the mayor and governor are co-authors of a lead report on what we deserve to do. Cooperation between the two workplaces has been weak for many years, especially the two-term urine contest of Cuomo and Bill de Blasio. The report, calling for a “New York,” argues that to meet the challenge of remote work, we want to make Midtown “more life-work-play. “(Gack). With this, they necessarily mean a large conversion of the work area into apartments. These conversions require new city zoning and new state legislation, and they don’t come cheap, but they’ve already been done in the financial district. Only older work buildings deserve to apply, as apartments are required by law to have windows that can be opened. .
One theory holds that New York is in a “catastrophic urban loop”: empty offices create a narrow tax base, forcing services to shrink, making the city less attractive, etc. York even for American cities in general. In fact, a November study on office recovery found that, of the ten most sensitive cities assessed, New York City made the most full recovery. San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago were in a much worse state. In fact, New York has survived many crises, adding to the catastrophic loop of the ’70s, though the city was so weakened by this holiday that Mayor Ed Koch, desperate to stop sports groups from fleeing, gave Madison Square Garden this loose pass. taxes on city assets. Koch later said that he even believed that the tax relief was only ten years, so he was.
In late January, President Joe Biden and his transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, arrived in New York with good news. A federal grant was awarded to a long-standing project called Gateway, which aims to rebuild the rail line. Biden delivered a speech at railroad yards near the Hudson River, among rows of shiny train cars, supported by staff dressed in orange high-visibility vests. “This is one of the most important and vital assignments in the country,” he said. I wasn’t wrong. Among other things, Gateway will install two new tunnels under the Hudson River. The existing tunnels, built in 1910, were flooded by Hurricane Sandy, and saltwater corrosion accelerated their deterioration, causing chronic delays. They are already running at full capacity, using about 450 trains per day, and a breakdown would be catastrophic. The northeast corridor, which runs from Washington, D. C. , to Boston, would be cut; The economic impact can cause a national recession.
Senator Schumer, who was present, was on the moon. “Finally, finally, finally, we can say that Gateway will be built!”His optimism seemed premature. The tunnel allocation, which is expected to charge at least $16 billion, some of which comes from the federal government, has already been derailed twice: in 2010 through New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who reportedly wouldn’t raise fuel taxes to cover his state’s percentage of cargo. and in 2017 through Trump, who gave no coherent reason. Now, assignment officials say the tunnels probably wouldn’t open until 2035. And Biden’s announcement in the railroad backyard was less momentous than it seemed. The grant, in the amount of two hundred and ninety-two million dollars, will be used to help build the concrete envelope of a tunnel that extends a few hundred meters west of Tenth Avenue. That was it.
Alon Levy, a researcher at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at N. Y. U. , argues that Biden’s management rejects grants to renovate Penn Station, and that money donated to New York will likely be wasted. Levy is an avid supporter of Gateway, but thinks it can be done for a fraction of the proposed cost.
“It’s trivially simple to spend money,” Levy told me. Example: All New York City subway stations deserve to be available to other people with disabilities, at a projected cost of seventy million dollars depending on the station. Berlin does the same, for between two and five million dollars per station. Berlin’s subway stations are simpler, Levy said, and will require fewer elevators, but that doesn’t make the disparity. This is partly because planners in New York inflate estimates, to avoid being blamed for overloading. But doing so, Levy said, “ensures overtaking. “
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U. S. managers The U. S. largely ignores more productive global practices, Levy continued: “Insularity is a big problem. It gets worse as you go by. Political appointees, politicians themselves, are the worst. Then there’s the revolving door. People leave the government, go into consulting, are hired through their former colleagues for 3 times their previous salary. But there is no urgency, there are no new ideas. Just a thought of the organization.
The U. S. passenger rail formula The U. S. economy never compares well to those in Europe or East Asia. We don’t have a bullet exercise, unless it’s ninety-eight miles of Acela track, and even that can’t move the exercises fast enough to qualify as a bullet. exercise in China.
Speed isn’t everything, of course, and there are geographic and ancient reasons why passenger rail is so low in the United States. But New York City relies heavily on trains. It has one of the most giant metro systems in the world and a giant commuter rail network, and most of them are an old-fashioned and underfunded mess. Other subway systems, from Seoul to Shanghai, embarrass New York. Some of them have the merit of being newer. However, the Paris Underground and London Underground are at least like old, and they are cleaner, more efficient, much more reliable and do not have large stations as sinister and neglected as Penn.
These cities are also in a position to carry out massive new transit projects. London recently opened the Elizabeth Line, which required thirteen miles of tunnel in the city centre. Paris has embarked on an even greater expansion, aiming to charge sixty-eight new metro stations and two hundred kilometers of track, doubling the diversity and number of passengers of the system.
Meanwhile, New York has just opened a new L. I. R. R. line. from Queens to Grand Central, known as East Side Access. It was originally intended to last seven years and collect six billion dollars. It took 16 years and charged more than 11 billion. William Stead, who led the executive for eighteen months, told the Daily News: “This is the highest mismanaged allocation in the history of public works. The M. T. A. , he said, withheld 3 sets of books to mislead the public and the federal government. Contractors and (The M. T. A. says the situation has taken a step forward under new leadership. ) Per mile, the L. I. R. R. , the most expensive railway tunnel ever built. the Paris subway was, per mile, about one-seventh of New York’s.
Levy, who moved to Berlin four years ago, doesn’t share the pain of most New Yorkers who appreciate the destruction of the old Penn Station. A gap in the ground, with walkways over the platforms. The main theme is what obsessives call “aesthetics”, but performance: that the exercises are executed on time and at an adequate cost. In Germany and Japan, gateway assignments are published months in advance. At Pennen, you never know which direction an exercise will go until the last minute. When the announcement arrives, there is the inevitable race to this too narrow escalator.
Earlier this year, M. S. G. initiated the lengthy application procedure for a new operating license. Among the first steps was a public hearing with the local network council, which reliably described the lawn as an ugly neighbor, basically because of the way it obstructs Penn Station. The hearing took place at the end of February and Mr. S. G. He sent representatives to advocate for a new license “in perpetuity. “But one of them, an executive vice president named Joel Fisher, foresaw an unexpected possibility: that such permission wouldn’t save the lawn from eventually moving, say, to the position across Seventh Avenue that some of us still call the Hooters site. That “would probably satisfy us,” he said.
Layla Law-Gisiko, chair of the network council’s land use committee, has spent years battling M. S. G. She was amazed. After the meeting, he told Crain’s, “It was actually the first time we heard from M. S. G. express that they would have this option. The Post called it a “mind-boggling concession. ” Instead of summarily firing Fisher for his departure from the company line, M. S. G. made a comment that sounded more like an opening offer than a negative one. “If presented to us with a realistic plan, it would be centrally located, close to public transportation and address the $8. 5 billion in public investment that Empire State Development estimated it would charge for moving the garden, of course we would listen,” a spokesman said.
The invocation of the dollar figure originally generated to avoid discussion of a movement had a kind of poetic justice. Would Governor Hochul take the opportunity to begin negotiations?The plan he inherited for Penn Station has sunk.
Meanwhile, personal citizens and network activists seek humane solutions. At the Cooper Union event, Washburn and Chakrabarti surprisingly presented other plans. Washburn, who runs an organization called the Grand Penn Community Alliance, is sixty years old and has worked all over the world, but still describes himself as a student of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. According to Moynihan, “misexplained challenges” were the bane of public policy, and the Penn Station challenge had been grossly misexplained. The purpose is not, as in the Vornado plan, “higher working buildings with lower taxes paid. ” Purpose big station, thoroughly explained. “This is not about architecture,” Washburn said. “Green is the new civic. ” He led an extensive computer-generated video tour of his vision: tearing down the lawn and Two Penn and turning much of the block into a park, with five full halls below. At the eastern end of the superblock, a neoclassical station, built in granite and glass. The stopover ended with a table elegantly set in a great eating position at an exercise station — the best position for proposing, Washburn suggested. The crowd enjoyed it. He left them with a rallying cry: “No surrfinisher!
Chakrabarti wore a gray suit with an open collar. “Penn Station is, to me, more than an exercise station,” he said. The central question, he said, was “Do we still have a public city?What was lost, with Penn Station, was the trust that American cities serve the other people who live and work there. Rebuilding urban infrastructure to a popular ceiling meant renewing this confidence.
He showed slides of his outstanding redesigned grass superstructure, with the station flooded with light. But his narration was ruthless. As for Two Penn, he said, he would leave it there. The construction was “not architecturally distinctive,” he admitted, but it would cost too much for Vornado to demolish. The crowd seemed reluctant to this concession. Chakrabarti pointed out some messes with the design of the original Penn Station and observed, “There can be wonderful architecture that is not wonderful urbanism. “These problems were also poorly received.
Chakrabarti presented his proposal to move the lawn to West Thirty-Four Street, across from Macy’s. In this room of the Cooper Union, it was a bit like presenting the new shiny redoubt of the enemy, which will have to be built for him. However, Chakrabarti lost the crowd when he showed a proposal for the blocks on which the new turf would sit. On the corners, on the avenues, were the mixed-use super-large ones that would help pay for the entire megaproject. they looked bigger than the Empire State Building. Chakrabarti smiled and looked at the audience while covering his eyes. “I need to meet the other people who move to New York and hate skyscrapers,” he said. ♦
The whale thing from “Free Willy”.
They thought they had discovered the best apartment. They were not alone.
It is one of the oldest buildings in the city center. Why don’t you take a look to save it?
The biggest black on the right.
After top school football stars were charged with rape, online watchdogs demanded justice.
The oldest temple in the world and civilization.
A comedian e-book by Alison Bechdel: The Seven-Minute Semisadistic Workout.
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