Penn Station Overhaul Moves Forward
New York state plans for a major upgrade to Pennsylvania Station and the accompanying development of 10 skyscrapers on surrounding blocks won a key approval last week, as questions about the future of commuting to work linger.
As I reported in The Wall Street Journal, officials envision a new glass-covered concourse for the city’s largest rail hub, which is used by Amtrak trains as well as commuters from New Jersey and Long Island who currently catch trains in a cramped, underground concourse. Improvements to the Midtown Manhattan station would include more entrances and an underground connection to nearby Herald Square. The plan allows for development 18 million square feet of new space; most of the new buildings will house commercial offices, but the state plan also calls for up to 1,798 new housing units.
This is a big bet on the central business district at a time when the pandemic has disrupted normal commuting patterns and is slowly rewriting the geography of New York. Office occupancy in the New York metro area as measured by Kastle Systems analysis of swipe card data is barely over 40%. Weekday ridership on the Long Island Rail Road, which feeds into Penn Station, is hovering around 60%.
“I think we’ve seen a permanent change in the way that people see relationships with their offices,” said Diana Gonzalez, campaign manager for Trains Before Towers, a coalition that opposed the development plan.
Supporters of the plan—including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams—expressed confidence in Midtown’s long-term future. “You don’t bet against the future of New York City,” said Holly Leicht, an executive vice president at Empire State Development, the state authority that approved the plan.
I’ve been taking trains to New York through Penn Station for 20 years, and it’s hardly a majestic experience. The original Beaux-Arts station was torn down in 1963, to make way for the current stygian catacombs beneath Madison Square Garden. The late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of quoting Vincent Scully, who noted, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat." Hochul recently called it a “hellhole.”
The basic plan to upgrade the station by upsizing the surrounding blocks was conceived by Andrew Cuomo, who spent years laying the groundwork to push the project over local opposition and around New York City’s zoning process. In 2018, he slipped language into a budget bill that would bolster the state’s case to use eminent domain against any recalcitrant property owner. Two years later, he announced plans to acquire a full city block south of the existing station that would let it add more tracks. Hochul has put that part of the project on the back burner.
Cuomo also paved the way when, after Amazon abandoned plans for a headquarters campus in Queens, the former governor weakened the power of legislators on an obscure stopgap called the Public Authorities Control Board. POLITICO’s Danielle Muoio Dunn wrote out a pending bill that would restore their teeth before the PACB takes up the Penn project.
If it goes through, it would be a big deal. Regional Plan Association President Tom Wright, whose group supports the redevelopment, said the redevelopment of the station and neighborhood would have implications beyond the city and was on the same scale as the construction of the World Trade Center. “This is city-building—it’s laying out a multidecade vision for where the city is going to go,” he said.
THE QUESTION: What year did the first Penn Station open its doors?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Before she took her seat on the Court of Appeals, Janet DiFiore was the district attorney in Westchester County. At one point, she also chaired the Joint Commission on Public Ethics.