In the 1960s, the beautiful Penn Station was torn down and replaced by the hideous Madison Square Garden, relegating America’s busiest train station to a cramped basement. Now, New York is poised to build a new grand Moynihan Station on the west side of 8th Avenue, in the old Farley Post Office building that happens to have been designed by the same architects. No sooner does this plan get on track, that the owners of Madison Square Garden suggest moving the arena one block west, into part of the block occupied by the proposed new station.

Does MSG simply have an irrational need to plant itself atop every beautiful station ever built around West 34th Street? Or does this plan actually make sense? One weakness of the Moynihan plan is that the tracks are under the current Penn station, not under the Farley building. Moving MSG could open up an opportunity to restore the station east of 8th to some portion of its former glory. The Empire State Development Corporation seems to agree, and what seemed like a crazy railfan fantasy might be possible. According to a New York Times editorial last week praising this very idea, ESDC’s latest Draft Environmental Impact Statement swaps the western half of Moynihan Station with MSG, moving MSG to 9th Ave and creating a new station on both sides of 8th. Unfortunately, this DEIS doesn’t seem to be online yet.

Of course, there are many ways to redevelop a block. Will we actually get a new station New Yorkers can be proud of, that can serve as a grand gateway to the Big Apple for arriving visitors from Amtrak and the Airtrains? (Even under the west-of-8th-only plan, only New Jersey Transit would have used Moynihan Station, not Amtrak or the LIRR). A beautiful station with large open spaces requires money. Putting office towers on top could pay for it (that’s what San Francisco is hoping to do to pay for a new Transbay Transit Center), but will the towers cut down on the available space, and will demands by developers for favorable economic terms or cost overruns force repeated downsizing of the vision, as is happening even without developers in the mix downtown with the Fulton Street Transit Center?

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Tagged: architecture, penn station, transit, urban plans

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.