As noted in NYRA #31, New York loves tearing down Penn Station. First they came for the revered Gilded Age original. Now they’re coming for the midcentury modern gem and urbane social condenser that was its replacement—plus the glorious survivor that is McKim, Mead & White’s palazzo-like 1908 Power Plant on 31st Street, (which should of course become the new home of the American Folk Art Museum). The TLDR on my earlier take: as a significantly New York State–funded entity in the heart of New York City, Penn Station is blamed for its own contemptuous neglect. Its condition has had little to do with its actual and wonderful architecture, and much to do with how people who don’t live in big cities feel about big cities. And feel about people who live in big cities, and who rely on public transportation, and who attend basketball games.
A destruction proposal once supported by New York State governor Kathy Hochul was to have raised a Hudson Yards East: a clot of ten supertalls, a laughable 540 units of affordable housing, and a desire that Madison Square Garden might waft away from above the train hall, possibly to the nearby site of the recently destroyed Pennsylvania Hotel, also by McKim, Mead & White. That faded in February as its principal developer paused in apparent concession to the post-Covid obsolescence of urban office space. The latest proposal to save Penn Station came in March, from Italian infrastructure development specialists ASTM Group, architecture firm HOK, and the person of Vishaan Chakrabarti—a former partner in New York City architecture firm SHoP, who by virtue of persistence and the charisma of “Penn Palimpsest,” a speculative vision commissioned in 2016 by his fans at the New York Times, has ascended to the status of gadfly and, perhaps even to his own surprise, the architectural conscience of lower Midtown. His consortium’s proposal balances conserving the midcentury beauty—plus the embodied energy and carbon—of the existing complex, and opening up its now-ten-foot-ceilinged circulation areas to lofty fifty-five-foot-high promenades full of light and air, (elevating LIRR and Metro-North commuting to the recently palliated experience of Amtrak riders in SOM’s repurposed Farley Post Office nearby). It manages this by leaving Madison Square Garden in place—many are pleased to tell you that’s impossible—but removing the Theater at Madison Square Garden, a 5,600-seat-capacity venue that hangs below the arena like a cat’s primordial pouch. Renderings suggest opportunistic expansion of the arena’s iconic cylinder into a boxy podium, which at least shows there’s always a better alternative to destroying the 1908 Power Plant.
It’s hard to tell how real this all may become. There are many stakeholders—ASTM has former MTA bigwig Patrick J. Foye as its new North American chief executive, but an April advisory vote by Community Board 5 extended Madison Square Garden’s permit by only three years—and many billions to be disbursed. Yet it’s potentially a model for new best practices. With sufficient refinement, it may demonstrate the kind of ever-more-swift, incisive, and granular stewardship around repurposing, adaptively reusing, and ingeniously weaving together old and new that—merely through good design—manifests dignity, delight, and density in our hyper-urbanizing and climactically catastrophic century. Could this be the architecture of tomorrow? Watch this space.