Today, New York’s Municipal Arts Society revealed the results of their recent design challenge to re-envision New York’s claustrophobic Penn Station. The reveal of the concepts comes on the heels of a vote by the city’s Planning Commission to extend the operating permit for the station’s upstairs neighbor, Madison Square Garden, for another 15 years. The fate of the arena and the station are inexorably linked, but the discussion around re-envisioning the station dances around the real concerns of on-site interests and avoids the question of more pragmatic improvements to the underlying infrastructure.

Penn Station is easy to diss. It’s certainly not a grand space, nor a particularly functional one. Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the New York Times makes a habit of denigrating the station regularly. Given the regular beatings in the press, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the place. The challenges to improving the space are large and complex (and that’s a big reason why they haven’t been tackled yet).

Several issues pop up in my mind:

Transportation infrastructure: Penn Station has a capacity issue; the two big components are train capacity and passenger capacity. In terms of train capacity, the solution involves new tunnels under the Hudson in some shape or form.

For passengers, the solution is only partly about the ‘station’ as we commonly conceive it, the historic edifice preservationists mourn. That Penn is long gone; but the operational guts of the station never left. Penn Station today, from the concourses down, is essentially the same as it was on opening day. Improving passenger capacity could involve a number of improvements, from the relatively modest expansion of platform access points through Moynihan Station (a project that only addresses a minority of Penn Station’s passengers and did not have the support of previous Amtrak leadership) to more radical changes such as widening platforms at the expense of several platform tracks.

In DC, the recently revealed plan to re-make the back-end of Union Station involves a complete re-configuration and re-build of the entire rail yard in order to widen platforms prior to the construction of air rights development over the tracks. The lesson there is to get your platform arrangement right before you start fixing columns in place (the concept involves the demolition of the existing parking garage over the tracks because the column placement is not ideal for Amtrak’s goals). At Penn Station, however, a lot of those columns are fixed. Even if you demolish MSG above, you’re not going to re-arrange every bit of the original infrastructure. The path dependence of many of those column locations is just too great.

Aesthetic improvements vs. functional improvements: From a great deal of the media critiques of Penn Station, you wouldn’t get a hint of the transportation problems listed above. Instead, the biggest objection is aesthetic. Across town, the magnificent Grand Central Terminal is celebrating its centennial, and the comparison is too juicy to ignore for Here and Now on WBUR.

Kimmelman makes the social case for great design and emphasizing the equity and democratic power that well-designed public space can have. However, design is not destiny. Even while Here and Now gushes over the greatness of Grand Central, they gloss over the fact that it, too faced neglect, deferred maintenance, and the threat of demolition. Kimmelman seemingly glosses over that erroneous causality.

Beware PATH: Kimmelman likewise criticizes Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH hub as an “architectural foll[y]”, now excessively over budget. At the same time, it’s hard to see the difference between the trajectory of both projects (at least, as envisioned in this design challenge) – both involve avant garde re-designs with little to say about the actual transportation infrastructure. Steven Smith’s accounting of the spiraling PATH project could be a prescient description for Penn Station:

The architecture critics were smitten. The design, The New York Times’s architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote, “should satisfy those who believe that buildings planned for ground zero must aspire to a spiritual dimension,” and he hoped that New Yorkers would detect the “metaphysical element” in Mr. Calatrava’s work. His design was supposed to spur development throughout the neighborhood and lead lower Manhattan, still reeling from the attacks, out of its malaise. To the extent that the critics were worried, it was about how it would fit in with the architectural context of the site, not its cost.

Mr. Calatrava would eventually become to be remembered with regret among those in his hometown of Valencia, where his City of Arts and Sciences ended up costing more than three times its initial $400 million budget. But at the time, Mr. Calatrava could do no wrong.

In New York, his starting point was far higher than it had been in Valencia. The Federal Transit Administration pledged $1.9 billion [ed. – now officially at $3.74 billion] for the project early on, and the Port Authority would throw in another few hundred million—a number that would climb much higher.

The lesson from ground zero is that projects like this are exceedingly complex. As Smith’s article shows, the PATH project involves complicated jurisdictional issues and a tremendous number of infrastructure challenges; the hub (with deep pockets backing the project) ended up absorbing most of those common costs.

Madison Square Garden: Penn Station has every bit of the complexity that the PATH hub does, and no element shows this more than Madison Square Garden.

All of the submissions to the Municipal Arts Society’s design challenge assume the re-location of the arena, and apparently did so without talking to the owners of MSG:

A spokesman from the Madison Square Garden Company replied, in part:

“It’s curious to see that there are so many ideas on how to tear down a privately owned building that is a thriving New York icon, supports thousands of jobs and is currently completing a $1 billion transformation. These pie-in-the-sky drawings completely ignore the fact that no viable plans or funding to rebuild Penn Station and relocate MSG actually exist. Not that long ago, MSG spent millions of dollars and three years exploring a move to the Farley building as part of the new vision for Moynihan Station. That plan collapsed for a number of reasons that did not involve MSG, but did involve many of the same people now pressuring MSG to move, including The Municipal Art Society, which created enormous obstacles to achieving the relocation.”

Indeed, MSG was once a willing partner in moving from their current site in exchange for a new arena. As the MSG spokesman indicates, the arena company decided to stay and renovate their current arena due to the slow pace of the complicated deal. The city has some leverage with the operating permit’s expiration date, but otherwise the air rights the arena occupies are privately owned, and the projected cost to buy them out in 2008 was close to $2 billion.

Now that MSG has invested an additional billion dollars into their renovation, not only has the cost of a buyout increased, but those advocating for moving the arena missed the most obvious window to strike a deal. Prior to the renovation, MSG’s aging facilities aligned interests. Now, MSG has little incentive to move, particularly when some of the proposed sites range the original short hop across 8th Avenue in the Farley Building Annex to the distant to Javits Center site along the Hudson (and far from the centrality, connectivity, and value of Penn Station).

The designs miss the art of the deal and ignore the reality that MSG will be, by necessity, a partner in any changes to the site. Ignoring this reality seems to only set the stage for disappointment in implementation. Matt Chaban in Crain’s writes:

The many—architects and urban designers—welcomed the latest push to undo the destruction of Penn, but planners and real estate bosses expressed grave reservations over the plans, which were drawn up at the behest of the Municipal Art Society.

“I don’t know how you do this without telling the people sitting on top of the station what you’re doing,” said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board, referring to Madison Square Garden.

Incremental improvements: Even without these visions, incremental improvements are possible. While the full scope of Moynihan Station might be ill-advised, the more limited phase 1, consisting essentially of an additional exit concourse providing additional platform access, is a reasonable investment. Additional investments across 8th Avenue could also clear out the maze of back-office and railroad support functions contained within the existing Penn Station facility (things like baggage handling, employee break rooms, a commissary for long distance trains, etc).

This diagram from New York State shows both the phase 1 concourse as well as the mess of rooms and corridors in the existing station. Clearing out those support functions from Penn Station allows for re-allocation of that space for additional passenger facilities and more coherent circulation.

To improve the feeling of the concourses, add an element of spaciousness, and potentially some natural light, there are options without removing the arena. As this section of MSG shows (see also this old cut-away from Popular Science), the arena floor is located on the 5th floor of the structure. The primary use of the lower floors is for MSG’s 5000 seat Theater/Forum. Relocating just the theater, combined with the removal of support functions from the lower levels, would provide a great deal of space to work with to create a more inviting passenger space.

This ‘plan B’ isn’t a new idea. Vornado Realty owns a great deal in and around the Penn Station complex and has a vested interest in improving on the station. Vornado’s CEO Steve Roth suggested as much in 2008 (The more incremental, pragmatic idea even had support from Senator Chuck Schumer):

Despite a push by Vornado and co-developer Related Companies to keep the larger-scale project alive via government support, Mr. Roth indicated he considers that scenario unlikely.

“[We] basically feel that something good is going to happen,” he said. “Either that the governments are going to get their acts together, which they probably will not, or … we have with Madison Square Garden a Plan B, which is they stay where they are, we take out the theater, we—underneath the seating bowl of the arena—put a new grand entrance to Eighth Avenue and a new grand entrance to the station on Seventh Avenue, and what that will do is create a grand train station. Not quite as grand as moving it, but pretty nice. Actually, spectacularly nice.”

Sticker shock: There’s also the matter of cost. SHoP architects estimated their proposal at a mere $9.48 billion:

All the architects insisted their plans were workable, and Vishaan Chakrabarti, a partner at SHoP, even presented a plan using air rights sales and payments-in-lieu-of-taxes to cover the costs of the project, which he pegged at $9.48 billion. “And that’s with a factor of 30% cost overruns,” he said, as though it were a selling point.

Steve Roth emphasized that the value to the private development in the area can be realized with a less expensive station:

Mr. Roth said that the “Plan B” would add just as much value to Vornado’s property as if the original plan went forward.

“Our company’s principal interest in what happens with this Moynihan, Madison Square Garden, et cetera deal is to improve the value and increase the value of our adjacent eight million feet, which we believe we can do equally as well with Plan A or Plan B,” he said.

In that case, perhaps those air rights sales and PILOTs could be directed towards the other infrastructure costs facing the station.

A path forward? Combine new station entrances using that freed space, new concourses with space freed from relocated support functions, incremental improvements at the platform level, operational changes to the operating plans for the railroad tenants at the station, and investments in new rail tunnels under the Hudson – and now we’re talking about a realistic path forward.

The Planning Commission’s new, 15-year operating permit for MSG is a step in that direction, both in terms of identifying realistic improvements as well as syncing the timeframe for the larger discussions about the site. As Matt Chaban notes, the only realistic outcome of the MAS’s re-visioning process is “the kickoff of a renewed debate about the future of the West Side.” And, based on other examples, a decade-and-a-half timeframe would seem to be about right.