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Old Posted Feb 9, 2012, 1:14 AM
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/ar...er=rss&emc=rss

Restore a Gateway to Dignity



By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
February 8, 2012

Quote:
It’s time to address the calamity that is Penn Station.

Nearly a half-century has passed since the destruction of the great 1910 station designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White, a “monumental act of vandalism,” as an editorial in The New York Times called the demolition in 1963. It was replaced by Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden, Modernist mediocrities, erected to serve real estate interests, with a new subterranean Penn Station entombed below.

Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined. To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.

...the only way to fix Penn properly is to move Madison Square Garden.

Why? Because the open secret about the Moynihan plan is that Amtrak alone would move across Eighth Avenue. Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit and the subways wouldn’t budge. And only 30,000 of those 600,000 people who use Penn Station each day take Amtrak, never mind all the subway riders passing through.

We have become a city too cynical about big change, resigned to the impossibility of unraveling bureaucratic entanglements, beholden to private interests, inured to commercialism and compromise.

We depend on developers to improve neighborhoods, and at the same time we waste unconscionable amounts of public money on architectural follies like the much-delayed World Trade Center PATH station, which is projected, even after ground zero is fully developed, to serve only perhaps 60,000 riders and whose exploding cost is already approaching $4 billion, a scandal still waiting to dawn on New Yorkers.


But demolishing the Javits Center also presents a possible solution to Penn Station. The thought is: Move Madison Square Garden to the southern end of the Javits site, at 34th Street and 11th Avenue. That is a prime location in what is hoped to become the busy intersection of a new Midtown South. The state, in conjunction with the city, would provide the Garden’s owners with a turnkey, or at least a very generous, deal: a new riverfront arena, partly financed by the substantial air rights gained in return for acquiring the Garden’s present site. The new arena, unlike the current Garden, would compete as an up-to-date sports and entertainment center with the one rising at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.

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