The event’s exchanges implied a Davids-versus-Goliath narrative that pitted community advocates and designers of bright, verdant, high-functioning civic spaces against private interests embodied by the Garden. That plan involved a combined station development and funding mechanism that included ten new commercial towers surrounding MSG and a neighborhood “blight” designation that opponents-particularly ReThinkPenn and the Penn Community Defense Fund, the event’s sponsors-viewed as spurious. The Penn Station situation has evolved rapidly since January 26, when a marathon event hosted by The Cooper Union offered several alternatives to the leading proposal at the time, the General Project Plan ( GPP) associated with Governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, Empire State Development (ESD), and Vornado Realty Trust. Yet the latest alignment of fixers could replace an unpopular scheme with one that is both infrastructurally desirable and politically possible. With the Garden facing a Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) deadline toward the end of July, when the extension to its 2013 permit expires, a collision is inevitable. On its site, the irresistible forces of design and transportation expertise meet an apparently immovable object: Madison Square Garden ( MSG). Designed for fewer than 200,000 daily passengers and now subjecting over 600,000 travelers per day to conditions more suitable for scuttling rats than for civilized people, let alone the deities invoked by the oft-quoted Vincent Scully line, Penn Station is a magnet for revisions. The one point that commuters, architects, planners, activists, and oligarchs of real estate, entertainment, and sports agree on is that the station, the region’s infrastructural pain point, must change. You may have to select a menu option or click a button.Penn Station and civic contention have been inseparable for six decades.
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