Real sky and clouds, let alone a little fresh air and room to move, won’t be an option as long as Penn remains as is, buried under Madison Square Garden. The best-laid plans for Penn have long involved persuading the Garden’s owners, the Dolan family, to leave their aging, inefficient arena for one that could be housed within the Farley building. Mr. Cuomo meets such suggestions with protestations that it can’t be done.

But not everybody believes that persuading the Dolans to move is so impossible. One of the most heartening — in fact thrilling — developments in the long Penn Station impasse has been the arrival of another renewal plan, so vastly better than anything that came before it that it’s a shame Mr. Cuomo hasn’t embraced it.

It comes from Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect and professor at Columbia University, who, after being approached by The Times’s Op-Ed page, came up with a plan last year. He proposed moving the Garden but saving its skeleton, turning the squat concrete cylinder into a pavilion of glass and air, flooded with sunlight, with a glorious map on the ceiling showing the street grid, an echo of the glowing ceiling of constellations at Grand Central Terminal across town. More important, this would clean up the mess below ground, reordering the way concourses and tracks connect with subways and streets — essential preparation for the day when new Hudson River rail tunnels dump ever more passengers into what is now a suffocating, pillar-choked maze.

Repurposing the Garden’s bones would cost far less than building a station from scratch. It would also reconnect the station with the neighborhood, which was one of the reasons Community Board 5, which advises on the area’s land use issues, unanimously endorsed the plan. It praised its “extraordinary vision and creativity, for achieving the goal of dramatically improving safety, light, air and pedestrian circulation conditions to Penn Station, while allowing for a new, state-of-the-art Madison Square Garden inside an existing historic resource.”