The Fight Over Penn Station and Madison Square Garden

How the effort to renovate midtown Manhattan’s transit hub has been stalled by money, politics, and disputes about the public good.
James Dolan sitting with his arm draped over Madison Square Garden
Penn Station can’t be renovated without moving the Garden—but the arena’s owner, James Dolan, doesn’t want to move.Illustration by Valentin Tkach

Pennsylvania Station, in west midtown, is the busiest railroad station in the Western Hemisphere. It is also a shabby, haunted labyrinth. I was there recently with Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect and city planner who has been involved for decades in efforts, most of them futile, to improve the station. We entered from Seventh Avenue, going down a narrow escalator with so little headroom that I flinched and ducked. On our left, a man was wrestling a baby carriage up a staircase, bumping step by step toward the street.

“It’s the architecture that tells you where to go in a train station,” Chakrabarti said. In Penn, the architecture generally tells you to go away. The area where we had entered resembles a dingy subterranean shopping mall, dominated by fast-food joints—Dunkin’ Donuts, Jamba Juice, Krispy Kreme. Three railroads and six busy subway lines converge in Penn Station, but from where we were it was hard to find your way to any of them. “Down here, the signage has always been a huge issue,” Chakrabarti said. His tone was equal parts earnest concern and professorial detachment; he was a professor at Columbia for seven years, worked as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s director of city planning for Manhattan, runs a global architecture studio, and lives with his family about a mile from Penn Station, through which they are often obliged to travel. Chakrabarti is fifty-six, tall, with a well-trimmed white chin-strap beard.

Farther down, toward the platforms, there were more issues: cramped passages with no signs, wires spilling from missing ceiling panels. People slept on the floor, propped against columns, surrounded by their battered possessions. It was midday, off peak, so even the New Jersey Transit concourse known as “the pit” was not especially crowded. Later, passengers would cram into the tight, airless pink-and-beige space to watch for a track assignment, which would signal a stampede for a single escalator. “I’m always worried about safety here,” Chakrabarti said. “Very low ceilings and very congested space is a very bad idea.” In 2017, a Friday-night crowd panicked by rumors of gunshots left sixteen people injured. A few weeks later, a broken sewer line poured fetid water into a busy concourse.

How did it come to this? The original Penn Station building, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece, was knocked down in the early nineteen-sixties, after its owners struck a deal with a developer. The extensive rail operations below it were left underground. “They basically built this manhole cover and sealed up the station,” Chakrabarti said. We were in a dreary waiting room near Eighth Avenue. Above, on the manhole cover, rose Madison Square Garden, a twenty-thousand-seat arena. The arena opened in 1968, along with a bland new office block known as Two Penn. During the construction, hundreds of massive support pillars were driven down through the station, clogging the walkways and platforms, turning the whole place into a basement.

This entombment happened at a moment when many Americans—starting with Robert Moses, the unelected official who directed New York’s infrastructure priorities for forty years—believed that the age of rail had passed, and that automobiles were the future. Indeed, traffic through Penn Station had been declining since 1945. But the decline reversed, as ridership on the commuter lines boomed with suburban development. By 2019, Penn was struggling to accommodate more than six hundred thousand passengers a day. All three of the region’s major airports combined (J.F.K., LaGuardia, Newark Liberty) see only a fraction of that number.

The windowless, grimy ant farm of tunnels and tracks got steadily more crowded, unsafe, and inefficient—a long-running crisis that every political leader from the governor on down seems obliged to denounce. Governor Kathy Hochul called the station a “hellhole.” Her predecessor Andrew Cuomo echoed Vincent Scully, the architectural historian, who said, “One entered the city like a god. . . . One scuttles in now like a rat.” Occasional relief efforts have been mounted. In 2021, an airy new train hall, named after its champion, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, opened across Eighth Avenue, in a section of the old main post office, with touches of grandeur meant to evoke the original station. And yet the new hall, devoted mainly to Amtrak, serves less than ten per cent of the beleaguered station’s passengers.

We made our way to street level, mid-block. Above us loomed the Garden, which is drum-shaped, mud-colored, possibly the ugliest big building left in Manhattan since the demolition of the New York Coliseum (a blocky monstrosity on Columbus Circle, conceived by Robert Moses). A vast L.E.D. screen flashed sports-betting ads at us. “You know, I don’t really like binary solutions,” Chakrabarti said. “I would love for someone to convince me that there’s a way to fix Penn Station with a twenty-thousand-seat arena sitting on top of it. I just haven’t seen a drawing that’s ever shown me anything like it.”

“And it was at that moment I realized that the only thing holding me back from culinary excellence was a bucket-load of butter.”
Cartoon by Anjali Chandrashekar

Many New Yorkers have reached the same conclusion: Penn Station needs a comprehensive renovation, and the main obstacle is Madison Square Garden. And so, ten years ago, the New York City Council told the Garden that it had ten more years. The Garden’s operations require a special permit, and the permit was running out in 2013. The arena’s owners, the Dolan family, wanted a new permit to run “in perpetuity,” and the Dolans, who pay no property taxes on the Garden—a little-known arrangement that has cost the city more than eight hundred million dollars—customarily get their way in their dealings with government. They own, among other large things, the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, which play in the Garden, and no politician wants to be responsible for driving a home-town team out of town. But the City Council held firm, voting 47–1 for a ten-year permit instead. The Times described it as “an eviction notice of sorts.” The permit expires this July.

The Dolan family’s money came from the patriarch, Charles Dolan, who is now in his nineties. A cable-TV pioneer from Cleveland, he came east in 1952 and wired lower Manhattan for cable when virtually no one knew what that meant. He co-created HBO, lost HBO, and founded Cablevision, which grew into one of the nation’s largest and most profitable cable operators. Dolan launched, bought, or sold a long series of companies, including American Movie Classics and eight regional sports networks. He failed in attempts to buy the Jets and the Red Sox, but gained sole control of Madison Square Garden and its home teams in 1997.

Dolan and his wife, Helen, had six children and lived on Long Island—first in Massapequa and then more extravagantly in Oyster Bay. Their son James went to SUNY New Paltz and, after being sent to work for Cablevision in Chicago, slowly emerged as the heir apparent. James was nothing like his shrewd, soft-spoken father. He had substance-abuse issues, a terrible temper, and a more abiding interest in rock and roll than in business. His father, asked about handing him control of the family companies, once said, “Mostly, it was because no one else wanted it.”

James was packed off to the Hazelden clinic, got sober, and, in 1995, became Cablevision’s C.E.O. Under his leadership, the company prospered and shareholders were happy; in 2016, a Dutch conglomerate bought Cablevision for more than seventeen billion dollars. As a sports-team owner, however, Dolan has seemed to please nobody. The Knicks, who usually made the playoffs, started losing soon after he took over, and have since compiled one of the worst records in the league. (The Rangers also went into a title drought, which remains unbroken.) Dolan has been willing to spend on player salaries, but the Knicks have consistently failed to jell. He’s approved bad trades, and has rarely held on to a coach for more than a couple of seasons. He clashed with Marv Albert, the Knicks’ popular announcer, over his criticism of sloppy play, and Albert left the team. Even staid Forbes once called Dolan “the dumbest owner in sports.” He’s frozen out journalists who displeased him, and has had at least one fan ejected from the Garden for yelling “Sell the team!” At times, the whole arena has picked up the chant, only to be drowned out by piped-in music. (Dolan, through his representatives, declined requests for an interview.)

Some of Dolan’s antics rise to the level of broadsheet news, but he most often features in the tabloids, where even the Post, which shares his conservative politics, regularly casts him as the quintessential heel—a silver-spoon billionaire with a mean streak and no clue. Most of the coverage he receives is accompanied by unflattering photographs, with Dolan, who is a pear-shaped five-seven, jowly and patchily bearded, usually looking both choleric and self-satisfied in his trademark long scarf in his front-row seat at the Garden. There is often something vulnerable in his expression, too, which is only more annoying.

Legislators have had no more luck than fans in contending with Dolan. Proposals to cancel the arena’s tax break have languished in Albany for years. The proposals’ supporters tend to be the same officials who regularly call to relocate the Garden as a first step in renovating Penn, such as the state senators Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Liz Krueger, who represent districts that include parts of west midtown. Their inability to convince their colleagues in the legislature may have something to do with M.S.G.’s lobbying operation in Albany, which is known for being well funded and persuasive.

It also helps Dolan that he is not afraid to attack officials who offend him. During the 2020 election season, Representative Max Rose, a Democrat whose district included Staten Island, called on Dolan to sell the Knicks, “for the good of all of us, brother.” Dolan immediately donated the legal maximum to Rose’s opponent, Nicole Malliotakis, and urged friends and other N.B.A. owners to do the same. Rose lost the election.

President Donald Trump supported Malliotakis, too, and after the election she returned the favor by voting against counting electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. Dolan and Trump go way back. He and his second wife, Kristin, got married at Mar-a-Lago, as did their son Charles. After Trump withdrew a White House invitation to the Golden State Warriors, the 2017 N.B.A. champions, because Steph Curry said he didn’t want to attend, Dolan wrote Trump’s campaign a check for a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

But Dolan’s most substantive political intervention, the one that New York operatives all seem to raise as a cautionary tale in the fight over Penn, came when Mayor Bloomberg set out to build a new football stadium on a platform above the West Side rail yards. Bloomberg’s plan was to lure the Jets back from the Meadowlands, the stadium in New Jersey that hosts their ostensible home games, and then to lure the 2012 Olympics to New York. Dolan thought that the stadium would create competition for the Garden, which was a few blocks east of the proposed site. He also objected to the public financing that it would enjoy. So he launched a high-volume advertising campaign attacking the idea, and used his connections in Albany, notably Sheldon Silver, a powerful legislative leader (who later went to jail), to block Bloomberg’s plan. Dolan even stepped in and offered the Metropolitan Transportation Authority almost twice the amount that the Jets would pay for rights to the rail yards. The Olympics went to London. The stadium never got built.

“AN URGENT CALL TO CIVIC ACTION”—that was the headline on a booklet distributed for a talk at the Cooper Union, in late January. The event’s sponsor was ReThink Penn Station NYC, one of an array of nonprofits and community groups dedicated to improving Penn. The complexity of the movement could be glimpsed on the sponsor’s Web site, which proclaims, “We are no longer Rebuild Penn Station. . . . We’re the visionaries formerly associated with Rebuild Penn Station.” The confusion is only exacerbated by such organizations as the Coalition to Restore New York, which claims to have “united unions, businesses, nonprofits and voters” but is actually a super PAC launched by M.S.G. in 2021.

The event’s first guest speaker was Lorraine Diehl, author of “The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station,” a concise history of Penn and its demise. Diehl reminisced about wandering the station as a child, passing through the grand waiting room—the one where Farley Granger was pursued by police in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.” Next door was the formal restaurant, originally called the Corinthian Room. Diehl had saved a menu from 1951, when a shrimp cocktail was fifty cents. “It had such a wonderful sense of occasion to it,” she said. Sunlight streamed down through the clerestory windows; it felt like New York was the glamorous center of the world.

In the late nineteenth century, before the station was built, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the country’s largest business enterprise, with a budget second only to that of the federal government. Yet its tracks ended, like those of every railroad approaching New York from the west, in New Jersey, on the banks of the Hudson River. In 1900, ninety million passengers were obliged to transfer to ferries to reach Manhattan.

And so the Pennsylvania built, simultaneously, a pair of tunnels under the Hudson, four more under the East River (to connect to the Long Island Railroad, which it also owned), and its monumental station in the West Thirties, at a cost of more than a hundred million 1910 dollars, according to “Conquering Gotham,” by Jill Jonnes. The station, designed by Charles McKim, of McKim, Mead & White, with inspiration from the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla, was the fourth-largest building on earth. Its main waiting room, panelled in Italian travertine, with fluted columns and coffered ceilings a hundred and fifty feet high, was the world’s largest room. The train shed was equally grand, with arching steel girders, staggered mezzanines, and glass-block floors that let sunlight through to the tracks. On opening day, a hundred thousand people came to see the station. The Times reported, “As the crowd passed through the doors into the vast concourse, on every hand were heard exclamations of wonder.”

The Pennsylvania’s archrival, the New York Central Railroad, enjoyed an easier route into Manhattan, coming in from the north over no significant body of water and gliding under Park Avenue at a negligible grade into its great station, Grand Central. Its owners, the Vanderbilt family, cultivated the East Side neighborhood around their depot, which was called Terminal City. Office towers sprouted nearby, and white-collar commuters could walk to their jobs.

Penn Station was more of a fortress, walled off from its neighbors by its grandeur, and, perhaps, by some Philadelphian distaste for the mean streets of New York. The railroad encouraged the construction of the main post office across Eighth (a money-maker for the company, which carried much of the mail), and it built the Hotel Pennsylvania, across Seventh, but otherwise it remained somewhat aloof from the city.

As hard financial times hit the railroads after the Second World War, both of the great New York stations deteriorated, but the vultures came for Penn first. The demolition aroused protests, mainly by architects, against what Moynihan called an “act of vandalism.” The failure of their efforts inspired the architectural-preservation movement. The city, over fierce opposition from real-estate developers, passed a law in 1965 to protect historic buildings. When a development scheme threatened Grand Central in the late sixties, the legal battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the station was saved.

When the old Penn Station was demolished, in the nineteen-sixties, it was referred to as an “act of vandalism.”Photograph by McKim, Mead & White / the New York Times / Redux

After its near-death, Grand Central was refurbished, and investment poured in. Dozens of restaurants, bookstores, shops, bars, and delis filled the halls and balconies. The station, with its celestial ceiling mural, is now one of the most popular tourist destinations in the city, and that’s not counting the hordes who trundle through on trains and subways. “You say, ‘Let’s get a drink at Grand Central,’ ” Chakrabarti told me. “Nobody says that about Penn Station.” Chakrabarti’s firm, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, has an office near Union Square. “We could pay a lower office rent near Penn, but nobody wants to travel through the station.”

In the debates over Penn Station, there is always a tidal pull back toward the station that was lost. That’s what ReThink Penn Station NYC has in mind: rebuild it, perhaps with slightly less expensive travertine and a few modern touches. But traffic through the station today is much heavier than it was in 1910, and it’s predominantly commuters—the relatively few intercity trains are now being handled at Moynihan. The station needs to be rethought in order to move people through quickly, safely, and, if possible, painlessly. The fundamental problem of the shabby neighborhood will not be addressed with another colonnaded fortress. Then, of course, there’s the Garden, crushing the station.

The Madison Square Garden that sits atop Penn is the fourth building to bear that name. The first two were constructed near Madison Square Park—in 1879, for P. T. Barnum, and in 1890, for Barnum and a group of tycoons that included Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. The third went up in Hell’s Kitchen, in 1925. This record of impermanence may explain why the businessman Irving Felt, who moved the Garden to its present site in 1968, showed little concern for the grand old station that he was demolishing. “Fifty years from now, when it’s time for our Center to be torn down, there will be a new group of architects who will protest,” he said.

In fact, no known architect will mourn the loss of this ten-story trash can. In 2013, after the Garden’s operating permit was limited to ten years, the Municipal Art Society asked four top architecture firms to design a new Penn Station. Each rendering was more fantastical than the last. One featured what looked to be an open-air stadium of greenery floating above a transparent ticket hall. All removed the Garden, some with greater care than others—one proposed extending the High Line, the elevated park on the West Side, to connect the rebuilt station with a new arena a couple of blocks away. A partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill called the Garden “a sideshow.” Vin Cipolla, president of the Municipal Art Society, was more pro-Garden. “A world-class city needs a world-class train station,” he said. “But it also needs a world-class venue.”

The Garden, it must be said, has nearly left its perch atop the station more than once. In 1987, plans were announced to build a new arena between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, next to the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The old place would be knocked down as soon as the new one was ready. That never happened, of course. The projected costs grew to hundreds of millions of dollars, and those involved lost interest.

Two decades later, Governor Eliot Spitzer got behind another plan: to move the Garden one block west, into a giant unused space at the back of the old post office. Spitzer came from a wealthy New York real-estate family, and, according to Chakrabarti, who worked on the plan, “he understood the natural logic of it and how it would eventually pay for itself.” There were plenty of differences between the parties—Dolan wanted to put neon signs on the building’s Corinthian columns, and was impatient to see the money—but Spitzer, who once described himself as a “fucking steamroller,” kept pushing. The Garden actually signed a memorandum of understanding with developers. Then Spitzer self-destructed in a prostitution scandal, and M.S.G. proceeded to Plan B, which was an expensive renovation of the increasingly shoddy arena.

In 2016, the Times, taking an unusual step into the middle of a municipal power struggle, commissioned Chakrabarti to come up with a new plan. The near-miss with the post office had left him hopeful about the possibility of compromise. “Yes, the Dolans own that land, so they have a lot to say about what happens to that land—it’s a horrible historical fact,” he told me. “But they got out of their own way in 2008. They can do it again.”

Chakrabarti’s design was an ambitious example of “adaptive reuse.” Rather than tear down the Garden, he proposed stripping off the “unsightly concrete cladding” of the exterior and replacing it with a “double skin” of blastproof glass, leaving the elegant steel superstructure in place. The result would be a light-flooded station, with ceilings lifted to a hundred and fifty-three feet and the egregious support columns of the old arena rendered unnecessary.

“There are two hundred and sixty-one columns that we think we can remove,” Chakrabarti told me, as we walked through Penn. We were making our way west along a platform, edging past thick columns, some of which were perilously close to the edge. “If you’re in a wheelchair, you’ve got a rolling bag, a kid in a stroller . . .” He didn’t need to finish the thought.

The recycling of the Garden’s skeleton would keep costs relatively low, with less construction work and minimal track closures. To build an entirely new station, he said, “would be like doing open-heart surgery on a running patient.” His own plan, though, required a profound transformation of the space that remained. Chakrabarti wanted to remove not just the arena but also the cramped concourse levels above us, which had been built to replace what he calls the “old, lacy mezzanines that hovered over the tracks.” Those mezzanines, with their glass-block floors, had worked well, and could again. He pointed into the blackness of the rafters. “Imagine looking all the way up from here,” he said. “You would be looking at blue sky.”

The projected improvements under Chakrabarti’s plan—in safety, efficiency, capacity, the traveller’s experience, and the neighborhood’s attractiveness and property values—seemed enormous. His ideas got a positive response from major stakeholders, including the neighborhood community board, which voted unanimously in favor of the proposal.

Chakrabarti met with state officials and a senior executive from M.S.G. to discuss the design. But nothing came of it. Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic for the Times, described Chakrabarti’s plan as a “provocation.” The provocatee was presumably Governor Andrew Cuomo—the only person powerful and belligerent enough to compel all the necessary players to work together.

One sometimes hears the lament that we need another Robert Moses—someone who can get big things done. Marc Dunkelman, a research fellow in public affairs at Brown, notes that the last major infrastructure project completed in New York City was the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. That was in 1964. Around that time, Dunkelman says, the left began to reconsider a central tenet of old-guard progressivism: that government could improve ordinary people’s lives. This faith now had to contend with a broad-based mistrust of government—a development that he links, at least in New York, to the abuses of power committed by Moses, such as the destruction of South Bronx neighborhoods during the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

In New York, decision-making authority over public projects was dispersed, with the advent of new agencies, new regulations, new requirements for community and environmental review. These reforms, all well intentioned, have had the effect of spreading veto power over any given infrastructure project to a baffling array of institutions and individuals. As Dunkelman once put it, “Everyone is so powerful that anyone can kill it.” A highway-tunnel project called Westway, which would have transformed the Hudson waterfront in Manhattan into a car-free zone, at virtually no cost to the city, was cancelled in 1985, for reasons that look picayune in retrospect. Among them was a legal squabble over an environmental review in which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers understated the possible impact on striped-bass habitat.

Dunkelman believes that the renovation of Penn Station might once have been more straightforward: “In the old days, they would just eminent-domain the Garden. Pay the guy, stop playing footsie, get it done.” But paying off Dolan would elicit outrage, he said: “Think how angry people would be. This guy who has ruined the Knicks and the Rangers now gets billions? Nobody has the power to make that deal stick.”

Actually, Eliot Spitzer nearly did, and so did Andrew Cuomo. In the peculiar power structure of New York, the governor, sitting in Albany, has more influence over the city’s mass-transit systems than the mayor does, including effective control over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Cuomo, who became governor in 2011, had his full measure of flaws, but he was serious about infrastructure. He drove an eight-billion-dollar renovation of LaGuardia Airport. He replaced the Tappan Zee Bridge, and rebuilt the Kosciuszko. He opened the first few stops on the Second Avenue subway line, where construction had been stalled for generations. He also completed Moynihan Train Hall, another long-stalled project.

But when Cuomo got around to the toughest and most consequential public-works problem in New York—Penn Station—he huffed and he puffed and he punted. He had a plan, but over the years it came to seem less like a plan to fix the station and more like a real-estate deal—and perhaps a favor to a political supporter, Steven Roth, the chief of Vornado Realty Trust. Ten “super-talls” would be built in the neighborhood—vast buildings, mostly offices, mostly to be erected by Vornado—with unspecified revenues used to revive the station. Cuomo first announced his plan in 2016, at Madison Square Garden. He did not dwell on the arena’s contribution to the station’s miserable state.

“How does it make you feel when people don’t wave back?”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham

The Cuomos and the Dolans have a history. Andrew’s father, Mario, once worked as a consulting attorney for Cablevision after he left the governorship. Andrew took large political donations from Dolan. This was not unusual. But then there was Joseph Percoco, Andrew Cuomo’s longtime factotum, whom he described as “my father’s third son.” In 2015, Percoco left his position as the Governor’s executive deputy secretary, under the shadow of a federal corruption investigation, and went to work for James Dolan. Percoco remained on M.S.G.’s payroll for months after he was indicted for taking bribes. He was later convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.

In considering the renovation of Penn, Cuomo may have been deterred by the sheer complexity of building a new station. Alexandros Washburn, an architect and city planner who was the first president of the development corporation that built Moynihan Train Hall, told me, “This is the most complicated piece of property in America.” He meant the “superblock” that contains the Garden, the subterranean main station, and Two Penn. Amtrak owns the station—basically everything below street level except the subway lines, which are owned by the M.T.A. Dolan owns the air rights above most of the station. Vornado owns Two Penn. The city determines zoning. With so many entrenched interests, Cuomo would be unable to control every variable, as he had, forcefully, on other projects. And a major renovation could take a decade; unlike with LaGuardia or Moynihan, he wouldn’t get credit before leaving office.

There was also the question of where to put the new arena. Chakrabarti proposed a spot on West Thirty-fourth Street, across from Macy’s—what I’ve heard him call “the Hooters site,” in honor of one of the entertainment options there. The arena, two blocks deep, would be so close to Penn Station that a disused pedestrian tunnel could connect them. Chakrabarti also proposed, in the redevelopment of those dowdy, underbuilt blocks, two super-talls, at the corners of Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Density is good, especially around busy transit. See Grand Central.

But Cuomo’s Penn Station plan didn’t even consider relocating the Garden. When critics asked why, he had a state agency called Empire State Development produce a quick paper concluding that moving the arena and building a new station would cost eight and a half billion dollars—almost three times Chakrabarti’s estimate. The City Council could serve the Garden with an eviction notice, but it wasn’t clear how seriously the owners would take it. What was clear was that Cuomo did not want to inconvenience them in any way.

Madison Square Garden has been New York’s biggest stage for mass entertainment for nearly a hundred and fifty years, and, for the Dolans, it has been a lucrative property. As bad as the Knicks generally are, the arena is almost always full for games, with even nosebleed seats sometimes going for two hundred a pop. The Garden stages more than three hundred events a year, and many of its patrons arrive through Penn. Step off your train, find a working escalator (or walk up the stairs), and you’re there.

Yes, it’s the oldest arena in the N.B.A. Newer arenas, like the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, have freight elevators that can carry semi trucks straight to the event floor. The Garden’s elevators can’t accommodate modern trucks—hence all the semis parked across the sidewalks, depressing the neighborhood and complicating the setup for events. And yet the show goes on. Prize fights, rock concerts, political conventions—even the Pope heads there to say Mass when he’s in town. Billie Eilish? Madonna, on tour with Bob the Drag Queen? In New York, you’ll find them at the Garden.

Among the less distinguished acts to play M.S.G. is Dolan’s vanity band, a blues-rock outfit known as J.D. and the Straight Shot. With Dolan out front and a considerable churn of personnel behind him, the band has produced eight albums, which seem to have sold mostly to family and friends. But it opens for big acts like Jewel and the Eagles, and its members travel by private jet—the perks of playing for a singer-songwriter whom Dave McKenna called, in Deadspin, “the richest touring musician in the world.” Dolan is apparently a dedicated student of guitar and voice—he shares a vocal coach with Lady Gaga—and he’s happy to talk with interviewers about his music, claiming that he is intent on mainstream success. Some of his tunes have made it onto film soundtracks, but those films were all produced by his ex-friend Harvey Weinstein.

Dolan seems to consider the Garden a private fief. In 2017, he had Charles Oakley, a retired Knicks star who had criticized his management, removed from the arena during a game; Oakley resisted, and ended up in handcuffs. Dolan bans adversaries from the Garden and other venues that his company owns, including Radio City Music Hall and the Beacon Theatre. He is presently excluding lawyers at firms that have clients in litigation against any of the Dolan companies—a set of entities spun off and reconfigured from Cablevision, which are often called simply M.S.G. Among the plaintiffs are disgruntled officers of pension funds, alleging self-dealing by Dolan or citing reckless company behavior that may have diminished the value of their investments. The list of banned firms has reportedly grown to ninety.

M.S.G. security uses facial-recognition software to identify those on its blacklist and ejects them without compensation for paid seats. This practice sometimes targets attorneys who know nothing about the cases in question. Kelly Conlon, an attorney, was at a Rockettes Christmas show in Radio City Music Hall with her nine-year-old daughter’s Girl Scout troop when she was confronted and removed. Conlon spent two hours on the street, in December rain, waiting to take the girls back to New Jersey. “It was mortifying,” she told local TV news.

Incidents like these, along with the ambient creepiness of an entertainment corporation using facial recognition against its patrons, cannot be good for business. In January, elected officials, including Representative Jerry Nadler and seven state and local politicians, wrote a letter to Dolan, protesting the use of facial recognition and reminding the company of its valuable tax break. Dolan has heard such threats before, and does not seem cowed. Last year, after the City Council threatened not to renew M.S.G.’s operating permit, the company sent back its own warning. If the permit expired, it said, “MSG would be permitted to raze the Garden and build another structure above Penn Station on an as-of-right basis.” (Italics added to evoke spooky music.) “As-of-right” means, in this context, without discussion. The company apparently got no pushback.

Dolan may be less engaged in the Garden’s day-to-day operations than he is in another project, the construction of a vast, ball-shaped performance venue in Las Vegas called the M.S.G. Sphere. But he would have to be much dumber than he is, not to mention a shirker of his duty to his shareholders, to move the Garden unless someone makes him an offer that’s too good to refuse. Do we really have to find a prime plot in midtown that’s acceptable to James Dolan, buy it, and build him a new Garden before we can get serious about fixing Penn Station? It seems we do.

Last September, Mayor Eric Adams announced that he was open to moving the Garden. “The Penn Station project is a crucial one,” he said. “And if that fits into Madison Square Garden moving into another location—maybe we’ll help the Knicks win.” He flashed a smile—a joke. “So we should be willing to speak with Mr. Dolan and see how it fits into the over-all scheme of that area.” After that, the Mayor seemed to lose interest. When the news about Dolan’s facial-recognition technology revived questions about whether the Garden would be granted a new permit, Adams brushed them aside, saying that he wasn’t interested in “how he runs his mannerisms inside the Garden.” Asked about moving M.S.G., he suggested that sitting atop Penn was the right place for it to be. “I think it’s a great location,” he said. “I’m happy with it being there.”

Governor Hochul has largely stuck with the plan she inherited from Cuomo, in which Vornado’s revenue would somehow help fix the station. She, too, seems disengaged from the problems at Penn—and, like Adams, perhaps overawed by billionaires like Dolan and Steven Roth, the Vornado chief. (Roth is a longtime Trump associate, but nevertheless maxed out donations to Hochul’s campaign last year. The Dolans also plied her with cash.) Hochul did give a speech last summer in a refurbished L.I.R.R. concourse at Penn, where newly raised ceilings—in an area that’s not under the Garden—provide some relief for those who use the “hellhole.” Her office distributed renderings for further improvements. The drawings are confusing, but the street view shows a truck jackknifed across a walkway, which is at least a familiar sight. Beyond the truck is a proposed source of daylight for the station below: a modest A-shaped structure running between the arena and Two Penn, which an architect friend describes as an “ass-crack skylight.” But building the skylight would require the consent of the Garden, which owns a closed taxiway inside the proposed footprint.

In November, the Vornado plan, with its ten super-talls and untold billions, seemed to go up in smoke. On a conference call with investors, Roth was asked about the schedule. He had no dates. In fact, he said, “the headwinds in the current environment are not at all conducive to ground-up development.” This was not so startling to anyone who had been following Vornado’s stock price, or, for that matter, interest rates for construction loans, but it seemed to come as a shock to the Hochul administration. Both sides insisted that the Penn Station project was still on, but it was hard to see how that could be true when Vornado was evidently unable to borrow a dime. Hochul, in her recent State of the State address, laid out an agenda of “147 Bold Initiatives.” Penn Station was not among them.

Amtrak has hired a prominent engineering and design firm to start conceiving plans for new tracks, platforms, and concourses in the event of a future expansion of the station. But it has never been clear that government is serious about really fixing Penn. The State of New York has created hundreds of public authorities to take responsibility for complex government projects in the past century. Penn Station, with its array of divergent players pursuing their own interests, has no coördinating authority dedicated to its reconstruction. There is federal funding available, under the Biden Administration’s infrastructure bill, and Senator Charles Schumer has been working overtime to insure that New York receives its share. As of late last year, though, it wasn’t clear that the various agencies that work out of Penn Station were even ready to make credible grant applications. Senator Schumer, for his part, was asked at a public meeting in January whether he thought Madison Square Garden should move. He paused uneasily. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said.

When “political will” is scarce, can these things get done without government? The Pennsylvania Railroad financed the construction of Penn Station and its tunnels by itself. The same was true for the New York Central Railroad and Grand Central. (Old William H. Vanderbilt, who inherited nearly a hundred million dollars, could have given Jim Dolan a run for his rich-brat money. “Let the public be damned,” he is said to have thundered.) But in those years passenger rail was a dominant business. Today, it is a public good.

“For this next trick, I’ll need a watch, a handkerchief, and a babysitter.”
Cartoon by Navied Mahdavian

Sports arenas are another matter. They are usually privately owned, and yet they often enjoy large infusions of public funds. Governor Hochul recently agreed to put six hundred million dollars of state tax money toward a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills. This type of corporate welfare is a function of politics, not economics. It’s crony capitalism—the winners, who generally risk nothing, are already billionaires.

Last year, it seemed for a moment as if the billionaires might help save Penn Station, in the form of the developer Related Companies. Related was founded by Stephen Ross (not to be confused with Steven Roth, of Vornado, although both are super-rich octogenarians in the same business). Its executives approached M.S.G. about moving the arena to a spot across Eleventh Avenue, near Related’s showcase property, a dense nest of glass skyscrapers known as Hudson Yards. Situated basically in the same place where Michael Bloomberg planned to put his football stadium, Hudson Yards is only half finished. The finished part occupies the eastern half of the rail yards; the western half, the idea went, is where M.S.G. could go, perhaps combined with a casino. M.S.G. walked away from the talks, without publicly acknowledging that they had happened.

Big projects often leave behind them a wake of failed attempts. Before Bloomberg’s unrealized stadium, there was, in the same spot, George Steinbrenner’s unrealized stadium for the Yankees. In the nineteen-fifties, another tycoon wanted to build the world’s tallest skyscraper there, but was rebuffed by the banks. Even Robert Moses had to make several runs at crossing the Verrazzano Narrows (bridge? tunnel? bridge?) before finally getting a bridge built in 1964. “All the channels have to line up—the political, the financial, the design,” Washburn, the architect and planner, said. The Moynihan Train Hall, begun under his leadership, took twenty-five years to complete.

The idea that we cannot get public works built except in collaboration with billionaires has become a kind of defeatist gospel among politicians, who are themselves dependent on wealthy donors. Still, Liz Krueger, the chair of the State Senate’s finance committee, told me, “It’s simpler not to do these deals with real-estate partners. You tend to lose in fights with real estate more than you win.” Although Krueger is pessimistic about the City Council’s ability to force Dolan to move, she assumes that the cost of effectively buying him out can largely be covered by issuing state bonds. “If the numbers look huge, let’s talk about bonding—forty- or fifty-year payments,” she said. “Then it’s not so scary.”

Other public-works projects in New York City, including the reconstruction of lower Manhattan after September 11th, have been funded by bonding. “We have the formula for doing this—bonds issued against the future value of development,” Chakrabarti said, one afternoon at his office. “It isn’t hard. Moving Madison Square Garden is a clambake compared to what we had to do at the World Trade Center.” Chakrabarti spent years working on the reconstruction of the World Trade Center neighborhood as Bloomberg’s director of city planning for Manhattan. “This is building a sports arena,” he said. “Other cities do it all the time. We’re New York City.” He said that as if it somehow meant “high-functioning.”

But moving an arena is not ultimately the goal, of course. The goal is a modern train station. “This is the future,” Chakrabarti said. “It’s about high-speed rail lines connecting all these business hubs.” Intercity trains will be well served at Moynihan. What’s needed now, he said, is a facility that will attract regular riders from New Jersey and Long Island: “We need to entice suburban workers back to New York City.”

In the three years since the Covid-19 pandemic began, hundreds of thousands of people have left New York—some temporarily, some permanently. It’s believed that Manhattan alone lost two hundred thousand households. Along with nearly forty-five thousand deaths from the virus, the economic blow has been harsh: more than a hundred thousand jobs have still not come back. Tourism, a major employer, is recovering slowly. But the harder financial hit has been the disappearance of commuters.

Nearly four million people used to enter Manhattan’s business districts on weekdays. Now, on average, slightly less than half the office workers in midtown come to the office. Whole ecosystems that served those people—shops, delis, bars, restaurants, food carts, nail salons—have been crushed, wiped out. The office-vacancy rate in midtown is the highest it’s been since the nineteen-seventies, when data first became available. Retail vacancies are also bracingly high. That Hooters on West Thirty-third? Closed permanently. At night, many streets that were lively three years ago now look and feel deserted.

Remote work is here to stay, and you can’t blame commuters for bailing. So many commutes are onerous, wasteful, soul-draining. Weekday subway ridership is a third less than it was in 2019, and the commuter lines have had similar reductions. A recent report issued jointly under the Mayor’s and the Governor’s signatures called the lack of riders “an existential challenge for the financial stability of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.” Janno Lieber, the M.T.A.’s chairman and C.E.O., says that the basic model will need to change; rather than relying on the fare box, he argues, transit should be funded as an essential service, like policing or garbage collection.

NJ Transit’s planners have suggested that its ridership may be regained by the early twenty-thirties, but the truth is that nobody knows. Empire State Development, which sometimes seems to exist primarily to produce large numbers for political purposes, announced that by 2038 Penn Station and Moynihan will handle nearly nine hundred thousand passengers a day—an increase of nearly fifty per cent from before the pandemic. Perhaps these numbers were meant to attract federal funds.

It’s some comfort that the Mayor and the Governor are co-signing a big what-should-we-do report. Coöperation between the two offices has been weak for many years, especially during Cuomo and Bill de Blasio’s two-term pissing contest. The report, calling for a “ ‘New’ New York,” argues that, in order to face the challenge of telecommuting, we need to make Midtown “more live-work-play.” (Gack.) By that, they basically mean a mass conversion of office space to apartments. These conversions require new city zoning and new state legislation, and they are not cheap, but they have been done before, in the financial district. Only older office buildings need apply, though, since apartments are required by law to have windows that can be opened.

One theory holds that New York is in an “urban doom loop”: empty offices create a reduced tax base, which forces cuts in services, which make the city less attractive, and so on down the drain. This prospect is being fearfully debated, not just for New York but for American cities generally. In fact, a November study of workplace recovery found that, among the ten large cities evaluated, New York was the most fully recovered. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago were in far worse shape. Certainly New York has survived many crises, including the doom loop of the seventies—although the city was so weakened by that experience that Mayor Ed Koch, desperate to keep sports teams from fleeing, gave Madison Square Garden that free pass on city property taxes. Koch later said that he thought the tax break was just for ten years—that’s how addled he was.

In late January, President Joe Biden and his Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, came to New York with good news. A federal grant had been awarded to a long-stalled project known as Gateway, which is intended to remake the rail line between Newark and Penn Station. Biden gave a speech in the rail yards by the Hudson, among rows of shiny train cars, backed by workers in high-viz orange vests. “This is one of the biggest and most consequential projects in the country,” he said. He was not wrong. Among other things, Gateway will add two new tunnels under the Hudson. The existing tunnels, built back in 1910, were flooded by Hurricane Sandy, and saltwater corrosion has accelerated their deterioration, causing chronic delays. They already operate at maximum capacity, carrying some four hundred and fifty trains a day, and a failure would be catastrophic. The Northeast Corridor, which runs from Washington, D.C., to Boston, would be severed; the economic impact could trigger a national recession.

Senator Schumer, in attendance, was ecstatic. “Finally, finally, finally, we can say Gateway will be built!” His optimism seemed premature. The tunnel project, which is expected to cost at least sixteen billion dollars, with roughly half of that coming from the federal government, has been derailed twice already—in 2010 by Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, who reportedly did not want to raise gas taxes to cover his state’s share of the cost, and in 2017 by Trump, who gave no coherent reason. Today, the project’s managers say the tunnels won’t open before 2035. And Biden’s announcement in the rail yard was actually less momentous than it appeared. The grant, for two hundred and ninety-two million dollars, will be used to help build the concrete casing of a tunnel that extends just a few hundred yards west of Tenth Avenue. That was it.

Alon Levy, a research fellow at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at N.Y.U., argues that the Biden Administration should refuse to provide grants to refurbish Penn Station—that money given to New York would likely be wasted. Levy is a passionate supporter of Gateway, but believes that it can be done for a fraction of the proposed cost.

“It’s trivially easy to waste money,” Levy told me. Example: New York’s subway stations are all slated to be made accessible to the disabled, at a projected cost of seventy million dollars per station. Berlin is doing the same thing, for between two million and five million dollars a station. Berlin’s subway stations are simpler, Levy said, and will require fewer elevators, but that does not explain the disparity. Part of it is that planners in New York are padding estimates, to avoid getting blamed for cost overruns. But by doing so, Levy said, “they’re guaranteeing the overruns.”

“Can you look up what their house cost, so I know what to wear for this party?”
Cartoon by Emily Flake

American managers are largely unaware of global best practices, Levy went on: “Insularity is a big problem. It gets worse the higher up you go. Political appointees, politicians themselves, they’re the worst. Then there’s the revolving door. People leave government, go into consulting, get hired by their former colleagues at three times their prior wage. But there’s no urgency, no new ideas. Just groupthink.”

The U.S. passenger rail system never compares well with those in Europe or East Asia. We have no high-speed rail—unless you count ninety-eight miles of Acela track, and even that can’t move trains fast enough to qualify as high-speed in China.

Speed isn’t everything, of course, and there are geographic and historical reasons that passenger rail is so feeble in the U.S. But New York City is deeply dependent on trains. It has one of the world’s largest subway systems, and a big commuter-rail network, and most of it is an antique, underfunded mess. Other metro systems, from Seoul to Shanghai, put New York’s to shame. Some of these have the advantage of being newer. Yet the Paris Métro and the London Underground are at least as old, and both are cleaner, more efficient, far more reliable—and certainly have no major stations as grim and neglected as Penn.

These cities are able, moreover, to complete enormous new transit projects. London recently opened the Elizabeth line, which required thirteen miles of tunnelling through the heart of the city. Paris has embarked on an even larger expansion, which aims to add sixty-eight new stations to the Métro and two hundred kilometres of rail line, doubling the system’s reach and ridership.

New York, meanwhile, just opened a new L.I.R.R. line from Queens to Grand Central, known as East Side Access. It was originally slated to take seven years and cost six billion dollars. It took sixteen years and cost more than eleven billion. William Stead, who served as its chief executive for eighteen months, told the Daily News, “It’s the most poorly managed project in the history of public works.” The M.T.A., he said, kept three sets of books, in order to mislead the public and the federal government. Contractors and consultants billed without restraint. (The M.T.A. says that the situation has improved under new leadership.) Per mile, the L.I.R.R. line was the most expensive rail-tunnel route ever built. The initial phase of the Second Avenue line was the most expensive subway track. Construction costs on the Paris subway have been, per mile, about a seventh of those in New York.

Levy, who moved to Berlin four years ago, does not share the grief of most sentient New Yorkers over the destruction of the old Penn Station. Levy once trolled transit geeks by proposing, on a popular blog, that the station could be just a hole in the ground, with walkways over the platforms. The thing that matters most is not what obsessives call “the aesthetics” but performance—that the trains run on time and at an acceptable cost. In Germany and Japan, track assignments are published months in advance. At Penn, you never know what track a train will leave from till the last minute. When the announcement comes, there’s the inevitable stampede for that too-narrow escalator.

Earlier this year, M.S.G. began the lengthy process of applying for a new operating permit. Among the first steps was a public hearing with the local community board, which has reliably depicted the Garden as a lousy neighbor, mostly because of the way it obstructs Penn Station. The hearing was held in late February, and M.S.G. sent representatives to argue for a new permit “in perpetuity.” But one of them, an executive vice-president named Joel Fisher, allowed for a surprising possibility: that such a permit would not preclude the Garden’s eventually moving to, say, the spot across Seventh Avenue that some of us still call the Hooters site. That “probably would satisfy us,” he said.

Layla Law-Gisiko, the chair of the community board’s land-use committee, has spent years battling M.S.G. She was astonished. After the meeting, she told Crain’s, “This was certainly, for us, the first time that we’ve heard M.S.G. express that they would consider this option.” The Post called it a “stunning concession.” Rather than summarily firing Fisher for his departure from the company line, M.S.G. issued a comment that sounded more like an opening bid than like a denial. “If there was a realistic plan presented to us, that was centrally located, in close proximity to mass transit, and that addressed the $8.5 billion in public funding that Empire State Development has estimated it would cost to move the Garden, we would of course listen,” a spokesperson said.

The invocation of the dollar figure originally generated to halt discussion of a move had a sort of poetic justice. Anyway, it was a place to start. Would Governor Hochul seize the opportunity to start negotiations? The plan she inherited for Penn Station has foundered.

In the meantime, private citizens and community activists work toward humane solutions. At the Cooper Union event, Washburn and Chakrabarti presented strikingly different plans. Washburn, who heads a group called the Grand Penn Community Alliance, is sixty and has worked all over the world, yet still describes himself as a student of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In Moynihan’s view, “problems poorly stated” were the bane of public policy, and the problem of Penn Station had been very poorly stated. The goal was not, as in the Vornado plan, “taller office buildings with less taxes paid.” The goal was a great train station, carefully defined. “It is not about architecture,” Washburn said. “Green is the new civic.” He led a sweeping, computer-generated video tour of his vision: knock down the Garden and Two Penn and turn much of the block into a park, with five full concourses underneath. At the east end of the superblock was a neoclassical station, built of granite and glass. The tour ended on an elegantly set table in an elegant station restaurant—a perfect place to propose, Washburn suggested. The crowd loved it. He left them with a rallying cry: “No surrender!”

Chakrabarti wore a gray suit with an open collar. “Penn Station is about, to me, more than the station,” he said. The central question, to his mind, was “Do we still have a public city?” What had been lost, along with Penn Station, was a belief that American cities should serve the people who live and work in them. Rebuilding urban infrastructure to a high standard meant renewing that belief.

He showed slides of his famous repurposed Garden superstructure, with the light-flooded station. But his narration was hard-nosed. As for Two Penn, he said, he would leave it there. The building was “not architecturally quite distinctive,” he admitted, but it would cost too much to get Vornado to tear it down. The crowd seemed restive at this concession. Chakrabarti pointed out some problems with the design of the original Penn Station, observing, “There can be great architecture that is not great urbanism.” These points were also poorly received.

Chakrabarti laid out his proposal to move the Garden to West Thirty-fourth Street, across from Macy’s. In that room at the Cooper Union, it was a bit like presenting the enemy’s shiny new redoubt, which we will have to build for him. Chakrabarti really lost the crowd, though, when he showed a proposal for the blocks on which the new Garden would sit. On the corners, at the avenues, were the mixed-use super-talls that would help pay for the whole mega-project. One of them looked taller than the Empire State Building. People actually booed. Chakrabarti smiled and looked out at the audience, shading his eyes. “I want to know the people who move to New York City and hate skyscrapers,” he said. ♦