Penn Station Rebuild to Wrap Glass Entrance Around Madison Square Garden

It’s beginning to look like Vornado CEO Steven Roth did New York City a huge favor earlier this year when he took the air out of the balloon for a massive redevelopment of the neighborhood on Eighth Avenue surrounding NYC’s Penn Station.

One of the biggest architectural blunders in NYC’s history was the decision to tear down Penn Station and build the fourth iteration of Madison Square Garden on top of it in the late 1960s.

The removal of the Victorian railway palace literally and figuratively turned Manhattan’s largest transportation hub—the place where hundreds of thousands of people get their first glimpse of the Big Apple—into a confusing and cramped underground rat warren.

Until recently, NYC’s plan involved a massive redevelopment of the Midtown neighborhood on Eighth Avenue, centered on a cluster of up to 10 new office towers—encompassing 18M SF—spearheaded by Vornado, which owns numerous properties in the area.

New York State was going to kick in $10B to redo what it declared was a “distressed neighborhood.” The plan included an upgrade of Penn Station.

Roth threw ice water on the plan during a call with analysts last month, telling them the prospect of new office tower construction in the city for the foreseeable future is “almost impossible” due to tight lending conditions.

Now, instead of building new office towers in Manhattan, the focus of the project appears to be shifting to something that’s been an urgent need since 1968: a redesign of Penn Station itself.

The New York Times reported this week that the leading contender to undertake a Penn Station redo is a revival of a plan the predates the office tower cluster scheme: a proposal from Italy-based ASTM Group that would wrap a 90-foot-tall rectangular glass entrance to Penn Station around the Reese’s peanut butter cup-shaped oval of Madison Square Garden.

According to the proposal, an aluminum and steel structure with glass facades and a glass roof will create two new light-filled train halls at Penn Station in a project that would be completed by the end of this decade.

Based on a rendering, upon the project’s completion MSG will resemble a gold poker chip sitting on a sparkling glass podium. The Theater at MSG, a 5,600-person venue attached to the Garden on the Eighth Avenue side, would be demolished to make way for the new train station entrance.

The glass entrance to Penn Station would be designed to synch up architecturally to the new Moynihan Train Hall, a $1.6B renovation of the century-old, Beaux Arts-style James A. Farley Post Office Building, nearing completion on the west side of Eighth Avenue across the street from MSG.

Moynihan Train Hall—named for the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who championed the project—is an airy, 90-foot-tall atrium with a glass ceiling, two levels of shops and a 225K SF ticketing hub for Amtrak and the Long Island Railroad.

After they knocked down the original Penn Station in 1967, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis led a successful campaign to save Grand Central Station, the beginning of a citywide effort to preserve historic buildings.