Madison Square Garden Says It Will Not Be Uprooted From Penn Station

The New York Times A cross-section published in The New York Times in 1963 shows how tightly squeezed the new Pennsylvania Station was by Madison Square Garden and the Felt Forum, now the Theater at Madison Square Garden. The station’s main passenger waiting room is highlighted.

The Madison Square Garden wants everyone to know: it isn’t going anywhere.

“It is incongruous to think that M.S.G. would be considering moving,” the Madison Square Garden Company said in a statement last month, especially as a three-year renovation, on which the company says it has spent $1 billion, is expected to be completed this fall. In other words, the announcement of the renovation in 2008 should have signaled that the Garden intended to stay put.

In one technical sense, however, its time has run out.

The special permit that allows the company to operate an arena with more than 2,500 seats in mid-Manhattan expired on Jan. 24, exactly 50 years after it was granted. The arena, with a 22,000-seat capacity, has stayed open this year with a temporary certificate of occupancy.

On Wednesday, the City Planning Commission is to hold a public hearing on the Garden’s request to extend its permit indefinitely (PDF).

“Virtually all special permits are granted without artificial expirations,” the company said in a statement. “In addition to this, M.S.G. meets all required findings for this permit and operates in a city where no sports arena or stadium has a time limit to its use. Given these circumstances, we have the reasonable expectation that we will be treated like every other applicant.”

Reasonable or not, the company’s expectations have not been met.

This juncture has emboldened advocates of a reimagined Pennsylvania Station to propose that the Garden’s permit be renewed for only 10 years, thereby compelling everyone involved to come up with a plan for moving the arena off the station before the permit expires again.

They say there is no other way â€" besides lopping off the arena â€" to substantively improve Penn Station’s main waiting concourse, which is the heart of the experience for both long-distance travelers and short-haul commuters. Amtrak and others have tried over the years, but the improvements were largely cosmetic.

The sentiment for binding the Garden and city planners to a tight timetable for solving the perennial inadequacies of Penn Station has picked up momentum.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times It’s hard to tell there’s a railroad station under there.

On Feb. 15, Community Board 5 in Midtown voted 36 to 0 against granting a renewal in perpetuity and proposed the 10-year limit instead. On March 13, an editorial in The New York Times supported the 10-year limit, noting that the Garden had already moved twice since its days on Madison Square. On March 21, the Regional Plan Association and the Municipal Art Society announced the formation of the New Penn Station Alliance (PDF), one of whose immediate goals would be limiting the Garden to a 10-year permit.

In the most procedurally significant development to date, Scott M. Stringer, the borough president of Manhattan, on March 27 endorsed a 10-year limit. “Moving the arena is an important first step to improving Penn Station,” he said. He focused on a constricted track and platform layout that cannot be significantly altered “since support columns for the arena run through Penn Station to its track level.”

The borough president, like the community board, has a formal role in the city’s land-use review process, though their decisions are not binding on the City Planning Commission or the City Council, which is the ultimate authority.

But Mr. Stringer’s declaration did elicit the strongest public rebuttal yet from Madison Square Garden, in the form of a statement issued by Kimberly Kerns, the senior vice president for communications:

“The Garden â€" a company that has recently invested nearly $1 billion in its arena and helps drive the city’s economy by supporting thousands of jobs and attracting hundreds of annual events â€" is being unfairly singled out because of a decision that was made 50 years ago: to demolish the original Penn Station.

“Adding an arbitrary expiration for reasons unrelated to the special permit process or requirements would not only set a dangerous and questionable precedent, but would also hinder our ability to make M.S.G. and New York City the long-term home of even more world-class events, and would harm a business that has served as a significant economic driver for the city for generations.”

The question of why city planners limited the Garden in the first place is not explicitly answered by the original document (PDF), though those familiar with the commission’s practices said it was standard at the time.

Mr. Stringer said the limit was imposed “largely out of concern” that the day might come when the station was no longer as underused as it seemed then. “The commission was correct,” Mr. Stringer said, “ridership through Penn Station has more than tripled since 1963 and is now well over capacity.”

It is possible to read the document and conclude that a 50-year term was chosen because Madison Square Garden Center Inc., the corporate predecessor to the Dolan family’s present-day Madison Square Garden Company, did not own the arena but instead held a 50-year lease from the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Today, however, the company owns the property outright, as it or its predecessors have since 1985.