An Alternative Plan

Michael Kimmelman, New York Times architecture critic

Train stations are more than just a bunch of platforms for getting places. They’re portals. New York used to have two of the world’s most ennobling entrances, announcing the city in all its ambition and glory, Grand Central Terminal and the old Pennsylvania Station. Half a century ago, it lost the latter to the wrecking ball, getting a shameful rat’s maze instead.

The governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, channeling his inner Robert Moses, has lately been promising to remedy what ails the city’s crumbling transit hubs. And this week he announced a plan to revamp Penn Station. Still entombed beneath Madison Square Garden, it has become the hemisphere’s busiest train station, serving 650,000 riders a day, three times the number it was conceived for — a figure equivalent to the population of Boston. They must stagger through crowded, confusing subterranean passageways to find the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, the subways and Amtrak.

The governor’s initiative prompted editors of The Times’s Op-Ed page to approach Vishaan Chakrabarti, who founded Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a New York architecture firm. Mr. Chakrabarti, who explains his plan in detail below, ran the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and he is a veteran of earlier Penn Station refurbishment proposals. The challenge: Can we go further than what the governor is doing? What would it take to truly transform Penn Station?

As many weary observers of the site point out, a nicer station is all well and good, but nothing matters more than Gateway, a multibillion-dollar project to dig new rail tunnels under the Hudson River. After unconscionable delays by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and others, the plan seems finally to be inching forward.

In fact, Gateway makes major changes at Penn Station all the more necessary. It requires improvements to the station, which it will need to handle added capacity, as well as the creation of a linked facility where Gateway’s tracks would arrive to the south of the existing station.

Skeptics may roll their eyes at Mr. Chakrabarti’s proposal, since even cosmetic improvements have been hard to come by, and the governor already has his own plan. But in recent years, momentum for change has been building. In 2013, after significant public protest, the City Council attempted to spur the Dolan family, which owns Madison Square Garden, to consider moving the arena from its site above the station.

Then Gateway started gaining steam.

Now Mr. Cuomo has announced his $1.6 billion vision to make the east end of the James A. Farley Building home to Amtrak and (this bit was new) to the Long Island Rail Road, with a train hall and immense retail and office space. Completion date: 2020.

One Penn Plaza Two Penn Plaza W. 34TH 7TH AVE. 8TH AVE. Annex Potential site and air rights for Gateway project W. 30TH 9TH AVE. Farley Building (proposed Amtrak, L.I.R.R. station) Madison Square Garden One Penn Plaza Two Penn Plaza W. 34TH STREET 7TH AVE. Madison Square Garden W. 33RD 8TH Farley Building (proposed Amtrak, L.I.R.R.-- station) AVE. 9TH Farley annex W. 30TH STREET Potential site and air rights for Gateway project AVE.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill are the architects. As with other big infrastructure proposals by the governor, design doesn’t seem to be his top priority. Vornado Realty, Related Companies and Skanska AB, the construction management giant, are the developers. They will contribute $600 million to the project, according to the governor. The rest comes from Empire State Development ($570 million) and a mix of the railroads, the Port Authority and the federal government ($425 million).

So Mr. Cuomo assured everyone. That said, Amtrak accounts for just 30,000 passengers a day, the Long Island Rail Road, 230,000, but only a fraction of them will use Farley. The governor did not predict how many. With the neighborhood to the west of the station booming, Farley is conceived to serve more and more riders, while providing quicker access to and from trains, opening space and relieving strains on the existing station, which will be upgraded. That’s the argument, anyway.

But the Garden remains an obvious obstacle to a hub serving all riders, one worthy of the city. Mr. Chakrabarti participated in negotiations during the mid-2000s when the Dolans, Vornado and Related spent years and many millions of dollars exploring the possibility of demolishing the aging Garden and building a new arena inside Farley. The goal was abandoned after Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a supporter, was forced to resign, and the Dolans concluded they couldn’t lose more time before fixing up the existing arena.

Mr. Chakrabarti’s plan reconsiders that mothballed idea. Unlike earlier proposals, PAU’s doesn’t envision demolishing the Garden but repurposing it, using its stripped skeleton to make a glass pavilion, which becomes a neighborhood gathering spot, not just a station. As opposed to a wholly new building, this one wouldn’t require any huge cash outlay for a new superstructure or even a new roof. It gets rid of many columns and other obstructions that today make the station a menace to public health. Its passive heat and cooling system would lower operating costs and let smoke escape through the top in an emergency. Independent cost consultants estimated the price tag to be around $1.5 billion.

So let’s round it up to $2 billion. Even at that amount, the project’s emphasis on reuse and resilience for a heavily trafficked station make it the opposite of Santiago Calatrava’s shopping mall/transit facility downtown, the $4 billion Path Station at the World Trade Center, which serves relatively few.

The design may bring to mind Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, with its ellipse of concrete piers and giant map on the terrazzo floor. Here, the ceiling presents the map of the city. Just as the new Amtrak train hall for Farley, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, reuses the catenary structure of the building’s original trusses to bring in natural light, this plan foresees a sunny public space, open to the street, framing views of Farley, its height dwarfing Grand Central Terminal’s main concourse. It reclads the arena’s facade with double-skin glass, doing away with doors into and out of the building, letting commuters, long lost in the existing warren, know where they are and see where they’re going.

Original Pennsylvania Station (1910) 168 ft. STREET LEVEL PLATFORMS Proposed Pennsylvania Station 153 ft. STREET PLATFORMS L.I.R.R./SUBWAY MEZZANINE Grand Central Terminal (1903) 115 ft. Buildings drawn at same scale. STREET PLATFORMS Original Pennsylvania Station (1910) 168 ft. STREET MEZZANINE PLATFORMS 153 ft. Proposed Pennsylvania Station STREET Buildings drawn at same scale. L.I.R.R./SUBWAY MEZZANINE PLATFORMS Grand Central Terminal (1903) 115 ft. STREET PLATFORMS

Mr. Chakrabarti argues that PAU’s idea doesn’t step on but complements Gateway, and that a new Garden could find a home, among other places, as the anchor tenant in Farley, alongside Amtrak, a concept officials in Mr. Cuomo’s office considered when shown the PAU plan. “They chose not to pursue it at this time not because the Garden wouldn’t move,” Mr. Chakrabarti reported back, “but because they have advanced the Farley station annex and want to see it through. I respect this, of course, but hope they view this proposal as the logical next step.”

Mr. Cuomo may not agree or want to think that far ahead. But the plan is presented nonetheless as a provocation, to keep up the drumbeat for a better station. Because even with the announcement this week, there’s still a long way to go.

How to Do It

Vishaan Chakrabarti, Founder of the architecture firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism and a professor at Columbia University

Penn Station is much more than a transportation center. As the heart of the Northeast Corridor rail system, it has the potential to link downtown to downtown along the Eastern Seaboard in a way far more economical, expedient and environmentally sustainable than air travel.

But while the governor’s recently announced plan is a step toward this goal, more must be done. What we propose in addition is a completely new commuter station on the site of Madison Square Garden, one that makes use of the Garden’s structure and foundations, in much the same way that the current station makes use of the tracks and underground mezzanine levels of the original Penn Station.

East River tunnels to Long Island (4 tracks) 1906 7TH AVE. W. 34TH STREET W. 33RD W. 30TH 8TH AVE. 9TH AVE. Tunnels to New Jersey (2 tracks) Open-air passenger platforms East River tunnels to Long Island (4 tracks) W. 34TH STREET 1906 7TH W. 33RD AVE. Open-air passenger platforms 8TH AVE. 9TH W. 30TH STREET AVE. Tunnels to New Jersey (2 tracks) Pennsylvania Station 1912 W. 34TH STREET 7TH AVE. Post office W. 30TH 8TH AVE. Western end of platforms 9TH AVE. 1912 7TH W. 34TH STREET W. 33RD AVE. Pennsylvania Station 8TH Post office AVE. 9TH W. 30TH STREET Western end of platforms AVE. Greyhound bus terminal 1960 STREET 7TH AVE. W. 34TH Pennsylvania Station Post office W. 30TH 8TH AVE. 9TH AVE. Post office annex Greyhound bus terminal 1960 7TH W. 34TH STREET AVE. W. 33RD Pennsylvania Station 8TH Post office AVE. 9TH W. 30TH STREET Post office annex AVE. Facade of original Penn Station 1967 7TH AVE. W. 34TH STREET Post office Annex W. 30TH 8TH AVE. Madison Square Garden steel rising 9TH AVE. W. 34TH STREET 1967 7TH Facade of original Penn Station Madison Square Garden steel rising W. 33RD Construction site AVE. 8TH Post office AVE. 9TH W. 30TH STREET Post office annex AVE.

The destruction of the old Penn Station building in the 1960s has been called one of this country’s most egregious acts of public vandalism. We propose to right this wrong by using the original station’s subterranean platforms and infrastructure as the base for the new station.

But equally important, “recycling” what’s there allows for the building of an ambitious new station at minimal cost and disruption. We could restore a gateway to New York with a scale consistent with other great public spaces in the city.

Critics of this plan will focus on the difficulty of moving Madison Square Garden. But it would be much more difficult to move the center of the platforms serving the station from beneath the Garden to under Farley. This is why under the governor’s plan, approximately 80 percent of Penn Station commuters will continue to use the tracks and platforms under the Garden — which means that any effort to improve their experience significantly has to start with a radical rethinking of that site.

And it’s not just about current users, who now number 650,000 a day. Amtrak’s Gateway project would add two sorely needed tunnels under the Hudson as well as four new platforms under the block south of Madison Square Garden. All of this means more trains and thousands more Amtrak travelers entering and leaving the station each day.

Without a reconfigured Penn Station, these travelers will pour into the maze of the commuter concourse under the Garden, especially if they are transferring into the subway system.

The Garden, which is getting old and has problems of its own, has compelling reasons to move. Given fair incentives, its owners, who have shown themselves to be reasonable and civic-minded, could be willing to move the arena 800 feet to the west end of the Farley Building, where there is over one million square feet of underutilized space.

Once the Garden is in its new home, its structure and foundations would be “recycled”: We would take off its unsightly concrete cladding, demolish the interior, rebuild the mezzanines and vertical circulation to the platforms below, and remove many of the support columns on the train platforms that passengers have to dodge today.

The concrete cladding would be replaced by a “double skin,” a blastproof glass facade that would allow in light and views while enabling passive heating and cooling. (A very different version of this idea was proposed by Columbia University students in 2008.) The engineering firms Thornton Tomasetti and Level Infrastructure established the structural, security, and sustainability design for our proposal.

Imagine an open, light-filled station, with no need even for doors, much like King’s Cross station in London (special shutters would deploy during inclement weather), instead of one reached only through dark passages. Commuters now languishing in a fluorescent-lit cave would see natural light and city views.

The familiar cylindrical form of the Garden could be transformed into a monumental yet transparent pavilion. We propose that the ceiling, which is the roof of the existing arena, feature a map of New York to orient travelers, a contemporary update of the stars on the ceiling of Grand Central.

This is a realistic, economical plan to create a grand civic space, lifting today’s 11-foot ceilings to over 150 feet high, with a small number of shops lining the side streets, a small park to the southwest, and much-needed taxi access to the east.

It would cost substantially less than the train stations at the World Trade Center and Hudson Yards, but with similarly effective results. According to an outside estimate by Dharam Consulting, our proposal would cost about $1.5 billion. Building a new arena would cost a similar sum, so the entire project would cost approximately $3 billion. A variety of public and private funding sources, from air-rights sales to tax-increment financing and bonds, are available to pay for the proposal. Given the potential to radically improve central Manhattan while creating a safe and dignified new station for all of Penn Station’s users, this is a small price to pay.

By making Penn Station an attractive focal point for the neighborhood, we would increase the value of the area’s office, residential and retail properties.

For the health, safety and vibrancy of our city, Penn Station should be transformed into a world-class transit hub with enhanced rail capacity and enduring public architecture, a place that rejuvenates its surroundings, just as has been done in other parts of the city, like Grand Central, Bryant Park and Columbus Circle.