Madison Square Garden, Permit Lapsed, Faces New Planning Pressure
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
February 15, 2013, 6:54 pm
"... The expiration of the permit is more than a matter of administrative arcana, however. It has been seized on by advocates of a comprehensive planning process for Penn Station and the Garden. They want the City Planning Commission to use the permit renewal as leverage to compel serious discussion about moving the arena to a new site, and getting it off the top of the train station — an idea that surfaces and sinks again with some regularity...
...On Thursday, as the Garden’s application began its journey through the city’s land-use procedure, Community Board 5 voted 36 to 0, with one abstention, to deny the permit extension, as well as the Garden’s accompanying request to install much larger signage on the Eighth Avenue facade.
Instead, the board proposed that the permit be extended only for 10 years, enough time for a thoughtful plan to be developed, but not so much time as to allow Garden executives and city officials to ignore or shrug off the idea. The board said it believed that a new arena at a different location would be “in the long-term interests of the tens of millions of people who travel through Penn Station every year,” as well as nearby property owners, New York City generally and the region as a whole...
...Robert D. Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, a private organization, said in an interview: “I have this old-fashioned idea that New Yorkers are entitled to having a world-class arena in Manhattan and a world-class train station. We’ve demonstrated convincingly that you can’t have both of these on the same site.” He said that a shorter extension of the special permit was a “pretty good idea” as a planning measure."
Madison Square Garden's Permanent Renewal Opposed by Community Board
February 15, 2013 10:18am | By Alan Neuhauser, DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
"...CB5 instead recommended at its full board meeting to approve a 10-year permit for MSG, giving the community time to develop plans to relocate "The World’s Most Famous Arena." Members want the arena to move in order to give room to expand the overcrowded Penn Station below.
"The committee thought that rather than granting the Garden a renewal in perpetuity, we thought we should create a planning period — a 10-year planning period …to find a better location for Madison Square Garden,” Raju Mann, acting chairman of the board’s land-use committee, explained Thursday night.
“We don’t have a world-class arena, frankly, and we don’t have a world-class [train] station. And we should have both.”
...The CB5 recommendation will next go before the borough president, who has 30 days to weigh in, and then to the city planning commission, before going officially before the City Council."