Quote:
Originally Posted by vkristof
NYC will NOT get a "new, greatly expanded and improved Penn Station" in this decade.
Nor, IMHO, with it get a new Penn in the 2020s.
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Given the insane logistics, lack of funding and intractable political bullshit surrounding a potential redevelopment of Penn Station, I completely understand (and partially share) your pessimistic outlook. The thing you have to remember, though, is that the westward shift in the center of gravity in Manhattan (resulting from Hudson Yards and Manhattan West) is going to erode the conditions that have prevented a redevelopment of the station so many times in the past.
While many enthusiasts have dreamed of vindicating the destruction of the old Penn Station by replacing MSG for decades, there has never previously been a good economic justification for doing so. Hundreds of thousands of people come into the city through Penn everyday, but the vast majority just jump on a subway and immediately head to jobs in further north in Midtown or in the financial district, or go shopping on 5th Avenue or in Soho. This is obviously a massive over-simplification, but the point is that very few of the people coming into Penn Station are going to shop, work or live in the immediate, walking-distance vicinity of the station.
With people only using Penn Station as an internal transit hub (ie, not interacting with the area immediately outside of it), it doesn't make that much sense to tear down the surrounding structure just to make their subway change more pleasant. Economic (and thus political) forces mimic this reality. A new Penn Station would be a huge boon for development and local businesses in the area, but who is going to spend millions lobbying for it? The shitty bars and parking garages on 31st that people don't take the time to visit in the first place?
Thus the Dolans, with the crazy money they make off of MSG, have no competition to fight back against preserving the status quo. Likewise, both the increase in the tax base and the potential for air-rights sales (like those proposed in midtown east rezoning) that would accompany a redevelopment of the station don't presently appear sufficient to fund a project of that scale (although a recent study by Crains argues that such funding is presently a practical reality).
Here's why all of that is going to change in the upcoming decade: Hudson yards is going to do ten times more for the areas immediately around Penn Station than even the high line did for Chelsea.
Penn Station is in walking distance of the hipness of Chelsea/Flatiron while being a stone's throw from tens of thousands of lucrative office jobs in the new west side. The initial draw to those benefits will cause development that will only build momentum on itself, rapidly causing people working all over city to begin to wonder why they hadn't previously realized how convenient it would to live right next to Penn Station (which is a great commuting point to literally everywhere). Once that catches on, property values are going to go through the roof--we've seen how incredibly rapid development can happen in this city when an area passes the tipping point (look at Williamsburg ten years ago).
I don't see a world in which Jim Dolan can hold back the tides of development to preserve his heap-of-shit stadium in that kind of sea of change. The political forces will realign to follow this new, greater source of money, they always do. The air rights of the station will balloon in value, making potential funding sources more obvious. The public will be interacting with Penn Station and the neighborhood around it in a different way, and constantly questioning why MSG has to be where it is. When all of that happens, the vision of a new Penn Station will go from something only passionately followed in a subset of the community and on forums like this to something that the city as a whole views as, quite simply, an inevitability.
The engineering will be a mess, but that won't keep this project from happening once the public begins to digest just how valuable a new Penn Station would be to the city (look at Hudson Yards).
I know this sounds like a stretch, but think about how foolish it would have sounded in the 90's to suggest that we spend over 150M to build park space on abandoned rail tracks in the middle of the meat packing district.
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