Long Island Construction Law does not own this content. This content was created by Michael Kimmelman and was published to the New York Times on July 7th, 2023. To view the full article, and to learn more about the New York Times, please click here.
If the latest flurry of news around two dueling plans to fix New York’s Pennsylvania Station has left you scratching your head, you’re not alone. Various officials I have spoken with are also fuzzy on details.
The only thing everyone seems to know for certain is that nothing meaningful ever really happens to improve North America’s busiest and most miserable train hub, despite decades of demands and promises. Hope has long gone to die on the 6:50 to Secaucus.
But now may actually be different.
Why?
For starters, because a highly detailed and, at the moment, clearly superior but unofficial proposal has suddenly emerged to challenge the one that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been slowly pulling together. At the very least, the new proposal, from a private infrastructure developer called ASTM North America, may be the disruption needed to get Albany moving.
Outlined for public officials and widely reported last week, ASTM’s six-year, $6 billion plan would reconfigure the cramped, confounding station, which is owned by Amtrak, into a single concourse with high ceilings and a grid of wide corridors that lets daylight, dignity and circulatory logic replace the rat’s maze beneath Madison Square Garden. On the outside of the station, a new, porous stone facade with landscaped terraces and rows of columns would restore a measure of the architectural sensibility and civic symbolism that New York squandered in the 1960s when McKim, Mead & White’s original Penn Station was torn down.
Unlike many others before it, the plan doesn’t involve moving the Garden. That dream, I’m afraid, has gone the way of Betamax and Blu-ray. Instead, ASTM pictures boxing the drum-shaped arena inside a square podium — re-establishing a street wall and the partial footprint of the old station.A lofty new Eighth Avenue entrance, framed by syncopated rows of columns that subtly nod to the old station and also to its Beaux-Arts sister, the James A. Farley Building, across the street, would lead down to a new 55-foot-high train hall with a map of the city’s streets in relief on the ceiling. To build the hall, ASTM would buy (reportedly for somewhere south of $500 million) and then demolish the Theater at Madison Square Garden, which clings to the west side of the arena, over the sidewalk, creating what has been for decades a two-block dead zone along Eighth Avenue.
ASTM’s team includes Severud Associates, longtime engineers for the Garden, as well as two architecture firms, PAU, based in New York and run by Vishaan Chakrabarti, who has toiled for years on various Garden renovation plans, and HOK, which oversaw the new Terminal B at La Guardia Airport.
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John Caravella Esq., is a construction attorney and formerly practicing project architect at The Law Office of John Caravella, P.C., representing architects, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, and owners in all phases of contract preparation, litigation, and arbitration across New York and Florida. He also serves as an arbitrator to the American Arbitration Association Construction Industry Panel. Mr. Caravella can be reached by email: John@LIConstructionLaw.com or (516) 462-7051.
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Long Island Construction Law does not own this content. This content was created by Michael Kimmelman and was published to the New York Times on July 7th, 2023. To view the full article, and to learn more about the New York Times, please click here.
