Gov. Kathy Hochul pulled the rug out from under Amtrak’s hope to double the capacity of Penn Station by tearing down the block immediately south of the present station.
“I’m not going to destroy a neighborhood,” the governor said.
She specifically rejected the demolition of block 780, the tax designation for the block between Seventh and Eighth avenues south of 31st Street.
That block—home to the historic St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, apartment buildings, garages, bars, and a strip joint—has been in the crosshairs of Amtrak and the commuter railroads for years.
“The neighborhood definitely feels relieved that the governor has come out and said it’s not the right plan to tear a neighborhood down,” said a leading defender of the block, Eugene Sinigalliano, president of the 251 West 30th Street Residential Tenants Association. “There has to be a better way.”
Since Andrew Cuomo was governor, the demolition of block 780 has been part of a larger redevelopment plan, known as the GPP, which would have constructed up to 10 new office towers around Penn Station and made way for a significant expansion of the station.
“I don’t think the demand is there for office [space] that was once there,” Hochul said.
Amtrak, which owns the station, and the commuter railroads that use it, New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road, say they will need that new capacity with completion in the 2030s of the new Gateway tunnels under the Hudson, the first new rail tunnels since the now defunct Pennsylvania Railroad tunneled under the river in 1910 and built the original, and long since demolished, Pennsylvania Station.
While her comments appeared to put the governor squarely on the side of local legislators and residents who have been fighting a southern expansion, it raised as many questions as it answered.
She has rejected calls to withdraw the GPP, and the principal property owner, Vornado Realty Trust, says it still hopes to build office towers on several of the sites. Originally, tax revenue from those towers was to be siphoned to fund the renovation and expansion of the station.
But last year Hochul “decoupled” the renovation from the GPP. In court however, her lawyers defended the GPP and said revenue from it could still fund an expansion of the station.The railroads have not been focused on the towers that might rise above the station, but rather on how many trains they can run into the station.
The current capacity is 24 trains an hour. The new tunnels will allow that to double to 48 trains an hour, and Amtrak and NJ Transit have said they will need all that to accommodate increased demand for train service into the city from the west.
“As owner of the station, Amtrak is fully committed to transforming New York Penn Station with our partners to ensure it meets the needs of both current and future travelers,” an Amtrak spokesman responded to Hochul. “The ultimate goal must be to achieve both the improved station experience and the increased capacity necessary to take advantage of the expanded train volumes made possible by the new Hudson River Tunnels and the Gateway Program. We welcome continued productive discussions and collaboration with all our stakeholders, including the state of New York, to deliver these vital improvements to Penn Station.”
Hochul’s comments shattered the united front the railroads have been trying to present, not always successfully, as they pursued both improvements and expansion. The MTA has been in charge of renovating the existing station while Amtrak was leading planning for an expansion.
“We had to get everybody really heading down the same tracks here,” Hochul said. “And that was hard because Amtrak was rather insistent that it be this larger 780 block. And I said, ‘I’m not going to destroy this neighborhood’. We can do the station itself. Make it something that we are proud of without having to destroy a neighborhood in the process. . . . I had to shift a narrative and a focus that was headed one way and pull them back and say this is how we are going to do it.”
It was not entirely clear what narrative Hochul was redirecting, other than that expanding the station southward was off the table, in her view.
Amtrak has said it is studying several possible expansion plans, in preparation for a major environmental impact statement, including a new station to the east toward Herald Square. But most followers of the complex saga view the southern expansion as the favorite of Amtrak and NJ Transit, which would be its main user.
At the same time, the MTA has been scaling back renovation plans, saying most of the money will be needed for new heating, air conditioning, and platform exits. The MTA has sought to exempt the renovations from the environmental review.
“It’s moving, it’s moving,” the governor said. “The challenge has been that Amtrak had a different vision. I want to redo the station. I want it to be magnificent. And if you go to the station there are major parts that have been redone already. They really have. It’s beautiful. but there’s parts that are still behind. I want to bring in the natural light. We have a great plan.”
Hochul said she plans to show those plans to President Trump in their next conversation about the city’s transit and infrastructure. That ongoing conversation has centered on the president’s desire to undo congestion pricing and the governor’s desire to squeeze more infrastructure money from Washington.
She said there had been “a little wince” from Trump when she mentioned the $7 billion price tag just for renovating the station.
“I won’t take that as a no,” she added.
“This is where having the president be a New Yorker, someone who understands how critical the infrastructures are to functions of our city, was good.”
Hochul’s comments came less than two weeks after the neighborhood’s Assembly Member, Tony Simone, called for revisions of the GPP to create fewer offices, more housing, and a park where the Pennsylvania Hotel used to stand. Simone’s plan eliminated a southern expansion into block 780.
“We are very happy to see that within two weeks of Assembly Member Simone bringing the topic back up, the governor has come around to his view that we should avoid destroying block 780 at all costs,” said his communications director, Jacob Golden.
In addition to pressure from Simone and the neighborhood, Hochul has been feeling heat from Rep. Richie Torres, who may run against her next year.
“The visual contrast between the grandeur of Moynihan Station and the squalor of Penn Station is the difference between a government that works and a government that fails,” Torres wrote in a letter addressed to Hochul but describing her in the third person. “It is the difference between Governor Cuomo’s model of building and Governor Hochul’s model of bureaucratic bungling.”
Torres urged the governor to turn the Penn Station project over to a public-private partnership of the sort that was used to rebuild LaGuardia airport. At least two of the current proposals for Penn Station, from the private firm ASTM and the not-for-profit Grand Penn Community Alliance, call for public-private partnerships.
There are now at least four competing and overlapping proposals for the future of Penn Station. Just last week the Grand Penn Community Alliance, which wants to revive a classical-looking station, argued that separating the renovation from expansion did not make sense.
Alexandros Washburn, the group’s chief architect, said that deciding everything together would produce a better long-term solution. His proposal called for moving Madison Square Garden and building a park above a rebuilt station.
His plan continued to envision a southern expansion.
But other advocates argue that a southern expansion would not be necessary if the railroads would work more closely together to run trains through the station, rather than ending their runs in the station.
The railroads have said they are studying this, but don’t think it can produce enough additional service. Gene Sinigalliano and others have demanded an independent review of whether this approach, known as “through running,” could reduce or eliminate the need for expanding the station beyond its current footprint.
“There is no transit or other need to demolish block 780,” said Samuel Turvey, leader of ReThinkNYC, a proponent of through-running trains that don’t have to end their runs at Penn Station.