It’s a request the City Council should deny.
The last thing New York needs is to enshrine the aging and oppressive Garden, which may be the world’s most famous arena but is also one of the ugliest and, for millions of commuters using the station trapped beneath it, a daily blight.
The Council could grant a 10-year permit, enough time so that the Garden and the various parties responsible for the station can come up with an appropriately aggressive plan to improve the site, a plan that should include discussions about a possible future home, elsewhere, for the arena. Renewal of the permit is one of the few points of leverage the city has over the Garden.
The special permit approval process starts with Community Board 5, which is to vote on the request Thursday evening, after which the Manhattan borough president and City Planning Commission will make their recommendations. Then the City Council will rule.
The Council should also deny the Garden permission for signage of up to 17,300 square feet on the building (that’s more than five times the current amount). This would include signs of up to eight stories high on the corners of 31st and 33rd Streets on Eighth Avenue, and a 5,300-square-foot “media wall” on that avenue’s facade. The wall would no doubt create an appalling floodlight of announcements and advertisements that could only further degrade the neighborhood: an immense, flashing electronic billboard would be the first thing many visitors to the city see if Amtrak ever moves, as intended, to the James Farley Post Office building across the avenue.
The Garden, as compensation, proposes also to add directional signs on the surrounding streets and install a few semicircular benches and decorative concrete paving, along with “interpretive pavement inlays commemorating significant people and events associated with Madison Square Garden,” according to the Garden’s land use application. That’s what passes in the application for public amenities.
On their own New Jersey Transit, Long Island Rail Road and Amtrak have banded together to hire the design and engineering firm Aecom and James Carpenter Design Associates to devise ways to bring a little light and air down into the bowels of Penn Station. But so far the plans, hamstrung by the arena, seem only to recommend modest changes and perhaps the partial closing of 33rd Street at Seventh Avenue, to create a small pedestrian plaza. Serious change to the area, to heal one of most painful wounds the city has ever inflicted on itself, must involve the Garden.
Its owners, the Dolan family, have been pouring a billion dollars into upgrading the arena. New York taxpayers are effectively footing part of the bill. In 1982 the New York State Legislature, worried that the Knicks and Rangers might leave town, granted the Garden a tax abatement that last year alone saved the Dolans $16.5 million, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office. In 2008, by which time the abatement was estimated to have cost the city $300 million, the City Council recommended that it be ended, but the state legislature declined.
Penn Station was designed half a century ago when some 200,000 riders a day used it, but now 650,000 do, and that number is growing. With the Garden on top of it, relief is not likely. The City Planning Commission, which recommended the demolition in 1963 of the old Penn Station, now has, for the first time since then, a chance to atone by giving the permit a time limit. The permit that has just expired was for 50 years.
Several years ago the Garden entertained a proposal by developers to vacate its site and move to the back of the post office. Having just spent a fortune on improvements, the Dolans probably have no desire to entertain a move now.
But a decade of wear and tear should help to amortize their investment and make the notion of a new home more palatable, especially compared with the endless prospect of sinking yet more millions into an already decrepit building. The Garden has already moved twice since its establishment, in 1879. Another move, one that sustains the arena’s mass-transit link, could provide an opportunity to build what the Garden should be, the newest and best sports and entertainment facility in the city: an architectural landmark as opposed to an eyesore, lately made to look even worse by the arrival of the spanking new and striking Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
New York deserves better, not flashing signs, decorative paving stones and more of the same, in perpetuity.
Follow Michael Kimmelman on Twitter, @kimmelman.
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