But here’s another thought.

In his State of the State address last month Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo proposed redeveloping 18 acres on the Far West Side of Midtown occupied since the 1980s by the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. He announced that the Genting Group of Malaysia had agreed to pay $4 billion to build a new convention center, the country’s largest, at a racetrack casino hard by Kennedy Airport in Jamaica, Queens.

The proposal raises all sorts of issues, for Jamaica and Manhattan, which need to be carefully unpacked in due time. Among them, New York ought to demand direct train service linking Kennedy to Midtown in return for all those billions of dollars Genting has calculated it will rake in at the casino. As for the Javits site, the West Side is being rezoned and rebuilt for luxury apartment towers and enormous office buildings. It desperately needs more schools, green spaces, low- and mixed-income housing, a restoration of the street grid and enhancements to the waterfront, which the convention center has long blocked.

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. It would stand at the northern culmination of the completed High Line, and at the doorstep of a redeveloped Hudson Yards, where the new extension of the No. 7 subway line from Times Square will stop. Generations of New York sports fans have attachments to the Garden, but it has been moved several times before. The present arena is a flimsy, aging eyesore, notwithstanding the millions that its owners have lately been pouring into refurbishment — money that would have been amortized by the time a prospective new arena could be made ready.