Madison Square Garden, Permit Lapsed, Faces New Planning Pressure

Madison Square Garden Zoning Text Amendment Environmental Impact Statement The Eighth Avenue facade of Madison Square Garden as it would appear with new signage sought by the Madison Square Garden Company.

Madison Square Garden has been operating without a zoning permit for three weeks and will keep doing so in the near future.

David W. Dunap/The New York Times Detail of the James A. Farley Building, across Eighth Avenue from Madison Square Garden.

On Jan. 24, 1963, the Board of Estimate â€" then the city’s most powerful governing body â€" granted a special permit to allow construction of a new Madison Square Garden arena, with 22,000 seats, directly atop the Pennsylvania Station passenger concourse. The permit was required, in part, because the arena exceeded the 2,500-seat limit that zoning rules imposed on the site. It was to set to expire 50 years after approval.

Yes, for those doing the math at home: The expiration date has come and gone.

Now, the Garden is not in violation of the city’s zoning law. It has already applied for an indefinite extension of its permit, and the Buildings Department has been granting temporary certificates of occupancy.

The Madison Square ! Garden Company, which is headed by James L. Dolan, said in a statement on Tuesday, “We fully expect to continue to operate the arena in the ordinary course.”

The expiration of the permit is more than a matter of administrative arcana, however. It has been seized on by advocates of a comprehensive planning process for Penn Station and the Garden. They want the City Planning Commission to use the permit renewal as leverage to compel serious discussion about moving the arena to a new site, and getting it off the top of the train station â€" an idea that surfaces and sinks again with some regularity.

“We shouldn’t just resign ourselves to the status quo,” Raju Mann, the acting chairman of the land use committee of Community Board 5, said in an interview.

On Thursday, as the Garden’s application began its journey through the city’s land-use procedure, Community Board 5 voted 36 to 0, with one abstention, to deny the permit extension, as well as the Garden’s accompanying request to install much larger signage on the Eighth Avenue facade.

Instead, the board proposed that the permit be extended only for 10 years, enough time for a thoughtful plan to be developed, but not so much time as to allow Garden executives and city officials to ignore or shrug off the idea. The board said it believed that a new arena at a different location would be “in the long-term interests of the tens of millions of people who travel through Penn Station every year,” as well as nearby property owners, New York City generally and the region as a whole.

The Madison Square Garden Company said in its application (PDF) that large new promotional and advertising signs would “enliven and enrich the ! public ex! perience” in the surrounding area “by creating a visual connection between the indoor activity and outside, thus expanding the excitement of the Garden into the streetscape.”

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Community Board 5 said it was “concerned about the visual impact of new illuminated signage” installed at Madison Square Garden on the facade of the James A. Farley Building, across Eighth Avenue.

The community board said it opposed the signage because the large new LED billboards would be directly aross Eighth Avenue from the landmark James A. Farley Building, a monumental post office with a noble neo-Classical colonnade. The board said the presence of more advertising around the Eighth Avenue entrances to Penn Station â€" which are hard enough for newcomers to find unaided â€" “would likely confuse travelers and make this neighborhood even more difficult to navigate.”

Robert D. Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, a private organization, said in an interview: “I have this old-fashioned idea that New Yorkers are entitled to having a world-class arena in Manhattan and a world-class train station. We’ve demonstrated convincingly that you can’t have both of these on the same site.” He said that a shorter extension of the special permit was a “pretty good idea” as a planning measure.

The architecture critic of The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, made a similar point in a Critic’s Notebook on Wednesday.

On the other hand, the planning agency noted in a statement this week that a permit without a time limit would be “typical of virtually all special permits granted by the City Planning Commission in recent years.”

But neither a spokeswoman for Madison Square Garden Company nor a spokeswoman for the City Planning Commission would directly answer the question of why an indefinite permit was necessary.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Madison Square Garden as it appears now.

[The full text of the commission's resolution from Jan. 16, 1963, is available as a PDF. It is No. 9 on the calendar. Included is the rationale by which the commission refused to take into account the fact that building the Garden would mean razing the original Penn Station. "Whatever the merits of preserving and protecting privately owned buildings by virtue of their special historic, architectural or esthetic importance," the commission said, "the Zoning Resolution is not now an instrument for such protection."]