BY DENNIS LYNCH | Architect Vishaan Chakrabarti’s Manhattan-based Partnership for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) design firm has come up with its own scenario for a new Penn Station that would relocate Madison Square Garden, open its air rights for developments nearby, and turn the circular shell of the almost 50-year-old arena into a massive glass enclosure.
The transparent façade and 153-foot-high expanse above would give travelers an almost surreal arrival in the city. They would see the city sky around them, instead of having to navigate through a crowded maze of underground tunnels to reach street level, Chakrabarti said.
“My idea was a notion of creating a ‘gateway moment,’ that when you enter the city, you saw the city, you know you were in the city,” he said.
Chakrabarti arrived at the idea while flipping through old photos of the mid-1960s destruction of the original Penn Station and subsequent construction of the Garden. He found a shot of the unfinished skeleton of the Garden under construction in an “ah-ha moment,” realized that the perfect structure of a new station was sitting there waiting for him. The shell would have two layers of glass, like a double-pane window, to allow for passive heating and cooling. Fresh air would come in at the street level and hot air would rise and exit through an opening at the center of the roof. The glass envelope would be blast-proof.
Removing Penn Station’s street-level roof upon which the Garden sits would allow PAU to remove a number of the support columns that make the existing Penn Station feel even more cramped. That would help traffic flow, which will only increase when the state and New Jersey’s $23.9 billion Gateway program puts two new tunnels under the Hudson and four more platforms underneath the block south of the Garden.
Recycling the Garden’s shell would also save millions of dollars in construction costs. The $1.5-2 billion price tag is half that of the long-delayed and bloated World Trade Center PATH station project, and Penn Station currently serves roughly the same number of commuters every two days that the WTC station served monthly on average this summer. It could boost the local economy too, Chakrabarti contends, by turning what he called “a boulder in the heart of the community” into an attraction.
“All the space that’s around the station would become much healthier and vibrant,” he said. “Today you have a lot of people who go into the station and take the subway to their offices instead of wanting to get out and have their offices right there — the area doesn’t feel so great, and if it felt nicer, you’d have a lot more demand. It’s like at Grand Central Station, people get off and walk to their office. It would drive changes to the retail around it; it would make it more pleasant, not a place to get away from.”
Of course, the plan requires the Dolan family to willingly move their arena. The City Council declined their request to permanently extend the special permit that allows for the Garden in 2013, effectively serving the Dolans “an eviction notice of sorts,” as the New York Times put it. They have seven years left to find a new home.
Luckily, the PAU has already found them a space just 800 feet across Eighth Ave. The firm’s plan relocates Madison Square Garden to the Ninth Ave. side of the Farley Post Office building, the state will convert into a transit annex for Penn Station. They would sell the Garden’s air rights to developers for projects in the surrounding area, giving them the cash to pay for the new arena.
The state estimates transforming part of the post office into the 250,000 square foot “Moynihan Train Hall” will cost $1.6 billion and will be completed by 2020. The new station would house Amtrak and Long Island Railroad ticketing and waiting facilities, along with 588,000 square feet of retail and office space around it. Chakrabarti thinks his plan fits right in.
“You could definitely do both a Garden and a train station. They talked about office space — you can put an office anywhere, you can’t put the Garden anywhere,” he said. “We think that’s the best site. The Garden is a two-block-wide building so it can’t fit just anywhere. There’s only a couple places it can go.”
PAU presented their plan to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office, although at the time they did not consider it because the Dolans were not considering moving the Garden, Chakrabarti told the New York Times. As seemingly ideal and perhaps even utopian PAU’s Penn Station is, Chakrabarti does not think its undoable or that it couldn’t get gubernatorial approval.
“It’s less complicated than Hudson Yards and the PATH station downtown, if we can get those done we should be able to get this done,” he said. “Madison Square Garden should get a great new home; this isn’t so hard. Refurbishing the structure is quite simple, not to downplay the complexity of any project, in the scale of the things we do.”
