A “Compatibility Report on MSG” released on June 4 by the MTA, Amtrak and NJ Transit are all calling for major changes in the plans for the future of Penn Station.
For more than fifty years Madison Square Garden has sat atop Penn Station like a crown, but now, in a united front, the big three railroad concerns say that the Garden is “not compatible” in its location.
MSG Entertainment, the owner of the Garden and headed by CEO James Dolan, said it is “disappointed” by the new report and said it is only “the opinion of a few” and not representative of all stakeholders.
“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, but “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 strategic, coming almost on the eve of the City Planning Commission hearing June 7th to consider whether the Garden’s 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 fraught with various other 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.
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.”
The report and its conclusion leave plans for Penn Station and MSG in a limbo of confusion and contradiction.
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.
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 Eighth Avenue, and build a new loading area for trucks servicing MSG events to get them off the streets.
“Up to this point—and we have reached out to Madison Square Garden and asked them—proposed a set of measures that they can take to make themselves compatible,” Torres-Springer said. “Haven’t heard anything from them yet. So at this point, we would have to say that they are not compatible and not headed in the direction of compatibility.”
A spokesperson said the planning department anticipated that both MSG and the MTA would attend Wednesday’s hearing at which time some clarity may be shed on the impasse.
