Penn Station has steadily grown more crowded, unsafe, and inefficient, creating a long-running crisis that every political leader in New York is quick to denounce. Why hasn’t it been fixed?
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.
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 , and you’re there.
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.
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. 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.
When the old Penn Station was demolished, in the nineteen-sixties, it was referred to as an “act of vandalism.”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.
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.
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.
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