Empire Station

New York State officials led by Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled a plan this week to expand rail capacity at Penn Station in New York City by as much as 40% through the addition of a new bay of passenger rail concourses just south of the existing station. 

More specifically, the so-called Empire Station Complex plan would bring four new train concourses (and eight lengths of track) to an adjacent site currently packed with existing buildings, lending the chronically under-sized Penn Station complex an opportunity to grow and absorb an anticipated jump in rail traffic set to take shape over the next few decades. The plan would take over the entirely of the block situated between 30th and 31st streets and between 7th and 8th avenues immediately south of the station, enabling capacity at the station to grow by an estimated 175,000 passengers per day when fully completed. The station currently funnels over 650,000 commuters through its low-ceilinged and circuitous passages every day, making it the most active train station in the western hemisphere, The New York Times reports. 

An estimated budget and timeline for the project has not been unveiled, but previous estimates for a similar proposal were projected to cost upwards of $8 billion.

According to Governor Cuomo, the 175,000-square-foot addition would  be able to come online in such a way as to make the renovation of the existing Penn Station complex possible. The plan has been developed with the help of architecture firm FXCollaborative and bears a striking resemblance to a 2016 proposal crafted by JDS Development and FXCollaborative in response to a request for expressions of interest (RFEI) put forth by the state to rehabilitate and expand Penn Station.

The proposed expansion follows the implementation of another 2016 plan aimed at converting the Farley Post Office located directly across the street from Madison Square Garden into a new transportation hub serving Penn Station, the Long Island Railroad, and Amtrak. The project, dubbed the Moynihan Train Hall, is designed by SOM and is currently under construction. The project will bring new waiting areas and an expansive skylit-atrium to the station, it is expected to be completed by the end of 2020.

The Ghost of Penn Station

The current Penn Station exists as a ghost of its former self, which was designed in a buttoned-up Beaux-Arts style by McKim, Mead, and White and completed in 1910. The firm also designed the Farley Post Office building across the street that is currently being renovated. 

The original Penn Station was designed with the tracks and ticketing areas situated below street level, an arrangement that allowed the Pennsylvania Railroad Company that owned the complex to sell off the station’s air rights while retaining the functioning station as an exclusively underground complex in the post-World War II era. The station’s magnificent headhouse, shown above, was demolished starting in 1963 and was replaced by a pair of office towers designed by stylistically fluid architects Kahn & Jacobs, and by the modern Madison Square Garden arena, which was designed by corporate modernist architect Charles Luckman. The replacement complex, much hated by New Yorkers then and now, was famously derided by architecture critic Vincent Scully, who compared the old and new stations by saying, “One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.”

The demolition of Penn Station helped reinvigorate the American preservation movement and set the stage for saving other notable New York City landmarks like Grand Central Station and the Farley Post Office. 

Plans have floated around for years to re-envision Penn Station in order to restore some of the station's prior glory, but the expense and complicated ownership and regulatory conditions inherent to the project's urban site have precluded any meaningful efforts to bring the plans to bear. 

For example, a plan pitched in 2016 by Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) via The New York Times envisioned "recycling" the Madison Square Garden's drum-shaped exterior shell to create a new soaring lobby for the station, replacing the performance hall's existing brown concrete panel exterior cladding with massive panels of blast-proof glass. The plan, which incorporates details from what has become Governor Cuomo's Empire Station Complex proposal, requires moving Madison Square Garden to another site, a significant obstacle, but something that is not seen as being impossible. 

I fully support ⁦@NYGovCuomo⁩'s announcement for Penn South today, which was in our 2016 vision with ⁦@kimmelman⁩ and ⁦@NYTimesOpEd⁩, and sets the stage for moving MSG and fixing the center of Penn! ⁦@publicforpenn⁩https://t.co/1gTERK3x93 via @NYTOpinion
— Vishaan Chakrabarti, FAIA (@VishaanNYCA) January 6, 2020

Describing the plan at the time, The New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman characterized the proposal as "the opposite of Santiago Calatrava’s shopping mall/transit facility" at the World Trade Center site, positioning the proposal as a chance to not only bring Penn Station back to prominence as an iconic city space, but to perhaps, but to perhaps re-establish the station's status as the city's grandest transit center. Kimmelman praised the plan for reusing the bones of Luckman's design by transforming "the building’s original trusses to bring in natural light," adding, "this plan foresees a sunny public space, open to the street, framing views of Farley, its height dwarfing Grand Central Terminal’s main concourse."

In a tweet remarking on Governor Cuomo's latest proposal, Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of PAU, voiced support for the initiative, writing that the vision, "sets the stage for moving MSG and fixing the center of Penn! ⁦"

Could Governor Cuomo's latest plan be the one that finally brings Penn Station into the future? Only time will tell.