Cuomo's devotion to speed-of-delivery and surface-level jazz, his interest in projecting power and strong governance through imagery, is evident citywide. | Governor's Office The Cuomo aesthetic

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has often been criticized for making big infrastructure pronouncements that are heavy on grandiosity and comparisons to Robert Moses, but light on specifics and policy rationale.

But when it comes to the aesthetics of things, Cuomo is all about the details.


After the governor inserted himself into the ongoing effort to rebuild the little-loved LaGuardia Airport a couple of years back, he insisted the new plan include a central arrivals and departures hall, according to two knowledgeable sources.

The result would be an "architecturally unified terminal," he said in 2015, as well as a $400 million addition to the project, bringing its total cost to $8 billion.

The end product may well be a better-looking LaGuardia Airport, one that starts opening to the public in 2018, just as the 2020 presidential election is getting underway. The result may also be a somewhat better functioning airport.

But critics contend the arrival hall has little actual utility, and that the overall airport plan falls seriously short of the optimal outcome, since it does nothing to increase the facility's runway capacity.

He’s touted the “Ferrari-like” aspect of his new MTA buses, vehicles emblazoned with state colors that have wifi and ( hard-to-reach) USB ports.

"I like the blue, I like the sense of motion and the graphics," he told reporters last May. “It is sophisticated, yet not tedious, and is playful but serious.”

He’s festooning MTA bridges and tunnels with multi-colored LED lights that can be choreographed to music, and which he hopes will become a tourist attraction.

“So literally, you’ll have bridges all across the New York City area that are choreographed — nothing like this have been done on the planet,” Cuomo told reporters in January.

But the new buses will do little to fix the underlying problems afflicting the MTA’s under-performing bus system, and the LED lights will do nothing to solve the region's chronic congestion.

It's a Cuomo aesthetic that prizes the superficial and expedient over the substantive and more strenuous. Some experts find it jarring.

The lighting scheme is a “little silly,” said architecture critic Paul Goldberger, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and an architecture professor at Parsons.

In some ways, he said, it’s “an indication of how the governor has been very, very eager to show attention to infrastructure. He’s pushed certain things through very fast, so that he can show that something is happening.”

“It’s great,” added Goldberger, “that we’re redoing LaGuardia Airport, but it’s not the ideal plan for LaGuardia Airport. Its great we’re doing something for Penn Station, but it’s not the ideal plan for Penn Station. This is sort of in the same category.”

Cuomo's devotion to speed-of-delivery and surface-level jazz, his interest in projecting power and strong governance through imagery, is evident citywide.

His obsession with the optics of getting the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway done on time, and his fascination with its design details—including the artwork that his press shop called "the largest permanent public art installation in New York State history"—made news, but did little to address the subway system’s declining reliability.

His Moynihan Station plan will create a new train hall for Amtrak and some Long Island Rail Road riders and will possibly even look nice and expand above-ground passenger space. Cuomo's office stresses that it's an actionable plan, and a useful one, but according to Amtrak’s CEO, it will have “no impact” on Penn Station’s more fundamental problems.

Cuomo’s insistence on installing high-tech screens and other wayfinding improvements in Penn Station’s West End Concourse has reportedly delayed its opening (and its ability to alleviate some crowding for Long Island Rail Road customers) by more than six months. It's a characterization confirmed by a knowledgeable source but rejected by Cuomo's office, which contends that the improvements are necessary, and better to do them now than later.

"After decades of applying Band-Aids to the state’s decrepit infrastructure, the governor is investing $100 billion in actually rebuilding it," said Cuomo spokesman Jon Weinstein, citing a number that includes both federal and private sources of funding. "The focus of our infrastructure program—the largest in the nation—is to radically improve the safety, operational efficiency, and capacity of our systems for all New Yorkers, and it takes both building strong and building beautifully to achieve these goals."

The governor's penchant for shiny objects has become more glaring in the midst of a regional infrastructure meltdown.

On Tuesday morning, New York City’s subway riders were afflicted with yet another disastrous commute, thanks to a power outage at Brooklyn’s DeKalb Avenue, the second outage in two and a half weeks.

“2 of my Facebook friends who don't know each other started out posts saying 'Another day, another subway power outage,'" wrote subway blogger, Second Avenue Sagas, on Tuesday. "Seems problematic." (A seemingly endless compendium of bus and subway failures can be found here.)

Inconveniently for someone rumored to be considering the 2020 presidential election, advocates often blame Cuomo.

"Any one incident can be explained, but in the aggregate it’s clear that subway service is deteriorating and that riders are increasingly miserable," said John Raskin, the Alliance's executive director, in a statement issued Tuesday. "There’s no way to fix this without the Governor’s leadership, and where is the Governor?”

Cuomo's typical response is to refer to the size of his recent five-year MTA capital plan.

Tuesday was no different.

“Our commitment to the subways includes the largest Capital Plan in history – with more than $14 billion for New York City Transit alone – and nearly $4.5 billion this year in operating support,” said Weinstein. “These problems were not created overnight but there is no one more dedicated to fixing them than Governor Cuomo.”

But even that assertion is more appearance than reality, according to the non-partisan Citizens Budget Commission.

Including the $10.5 billion the MTA got in its last capital plan for Hurricane Sandy-related repairs and adjusting for inflation, “the 2015-2019 plan is the smallest plan since 2000,” said Jamison Dague, the commission’s director for infrastructure studies. Excluding the Sandy money, it’s the second smallest since 2000.

Tuesday’s outage came a day after Cuomo said that the MTA and the Port Authority were moving ahead with a train to LaGuardia, a project that is expected to cost much more than the $450 million price tag the governor initially attached to it, but that critics say is too circuitous to really improve travels times to the airport.

That Cuomo should be focusing on airports right now makes a certain amount of political sense. Via the Port Authority, Cuomo’s directing an $8 billion upgrade of LaGuardia Airport, and a still-hazy reconstruction of JFK. Together, they represent the most visible manifestation of New York infrastructure on a national scale. Tourists enter New York through them, non-New Yorkers transfer from one plane to the next within them.

LaGuardia will, as a piece of architecture, “be better than what we have now,” Goldberger said.

But Cuomo “has a certain tendency to combine a desire for a fast solution that will have the greatest impact in the shortest time with an interest in certain small details that will also accentuate the impact at minimal cost,” Goldberger continued. “He’s smart enough to know where the return is, in a way. ... He’s not wrong and it’s not stupid, but in the end we could be doing better.”