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Bombshell Report: After More than 50 Years, Railroads Now Say MSG is “Not Compatible” Atop Penn Station
A just released “Compatibility Report on MSG” by the big three railroad titans says that while loading plan arrangements were fine in a bygone era in the early 60s, that is no longer the case in 21st century NYC. MTA, Amtrak and NJ Transit in a show of unity are all calling for major changes in a dramatic new statement released June 2 about the future of Penn Station. MSG Entertainment, the owner of the Garden, blasted the new report.
For half a century Madison Square Garden, the fourth arena of that name, has sat atop Penn Station like a dental cap sealing the root of an extracted tooth.
Now, after all that time, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has joined with two other railroad behemoths, Amtrak and NJ Transit, saying the arena and the station are “not compatible.”
“The Garden’s site plan and loading arrangements may have been compatible with Penn Station and the surrounding community in the early 1960’s,” The MTA, Amtrak and Jersey Transit said Friday in a report.
“Today, however, MSG’s existing configuration and property boundaries impose severe constraints on the Station that impede the safe and efficient movement of passengers and restrict efforts to implement improvements, particularly at the street and platform levels.”
The timing of this statement was dramatic. Coming essentially on the eve of the City Planning Commission hearing June 7th to consider whether the Gardens permit to operate a large arena on that site should be extended after it expires July 24th.
A spokesperson for MSG Entertainment, which owns the Garden, pushed back: “We are disappointed to see this compatibility report from the MTA and the other rail agencies, considering how we have been cooperating throughout this process. This is the opinion of a few and not all stakeholders involved.”
The question of the Garden’s location has become entangled with several other interlocking issues, including how to create an acceptable train station, whether to expand the station to accommodate more trains and whether to build ten new super-tall office towers around the station.
If holding two thoughts at once is a challenge in public debate, integrating all of these interests has become one of New York’s most difficult and important civic Rubik’s cubes.
Which is why on any given day it seems the focus is on the most immediate piece of the puzzle.
Jamie Torres-Springer, who is the MTA’s President of Construction and development, told the MTA Board the other day that the MTA had been asked by the City Planning Commission for a report on whether the Garden and the train station, the busiest in North America and possibly the dankest, were compatible
“So at this point, we would have to say that they are not compatible and not headed in the direction of compatibility.”
On its face, this statement would appear to support the community and architectural movement to force the Garden to move so a better Penn Station can be built.
But that interpretation is, to say the least, confusing, since the MTA under the direction of Governor Kathy Hochul has been vehement that Penn Station can and should be improved quickly without waiting the years it would take, to say nothing of the costs, to find a new location for the Garden and move it.
The MTA holds this view so intently that it is even resisting a middle plan, proposed by an Italian developer, to leave the Garden in place but rip away the theatre and other structures around it to make way for a grand entrance on Eight Avenue.
Torres- Springer, in fact, said at the MTA meeting this would be a waste of scarce capital, even if some of the capital would come from the Italian developer, ASTM. Among other things the developer would need to buy the Madison Square Garden Theatre from The Garden, at a price that Torres-Springer said was in the neighborhood of a billion dollars.
On Friday, June 2, the MTA and the other railroads submitted their “compatibility report” to the city planning commission, laying out what they wanted from Madison Square Garden in exchange for the new operating permit it is requesting.
Fundamentally, the railroads want MSG to pay some of the costs for renovation and to agree to what they called “property swaps” in which MSG would give the railroads some land it owns to create a new midblock entrance to the train station, build new entrances at the corners of 31st and 33rd and Eight Avenue and build a new loading area for trucks servicing MSG events to get them off the streets.
Rest:
https://www.chelseanewsny.com/news/b...tion-BD2566333