“Today begins the design process,” she said. But it didn’t take more than a question or two before the governor started hedging. It also green-lit the design team it had already selected, a partnership of FXCollaborative, WSP, and John McAslan + Partners. With some glossy new renderings on hand, MTA chairman Janno Lieber announced a plan to continue working on the same plan that the agency had previously announced. The Eighth Avenue facade of the HOK/PAU design has echoes of Lincoln Center It also didn’t clarify the fallback strategy, which so far seems to be: Forge ahead and hope the money materializes, perhaps from the federal government. The statement failed to quiet hecklers who were demanding exactly that. As Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Representative Jerrold Nadler stood by, looking more shell-shocked than festive, Governor Hochul declared that she was “decoupling” the station renovation from the monster neighborhood project. That last nugget of news emerged from a strangely glum press conference held on Monday in the recently renovated LIRR concourse that the MTA now plans to rip out again and replace with a swoopy glass vault. Most important, the plan to pay for all that by ripping out much of the surrounding district and replacing it with a bundle of ultratall office towers is effectively, though perhaps temporarily, dead. Future passengers will navigate a single-level, H-shaped set of concourses, with a skylit mid-block atrium running parallel to Seventh Avenue. Despite that 10-billion-gallon hat set immovably atop the waiting areas, sunlight can be made to penetrate below ground. A broad collection of transportation executives, politicians, architects, and engineers now agrees on a few fundamentals: Principally, that Madison Square Garden can stay where it is, and Penn Station will evolve around and beneath it. If there’s such a thing as a contentious consensus, that’s what we’ve got. That should be encouraging to commuters, at least those who plan to ride the trains in the 2030s and beyond. Renovating the busiest and worst rail hub in North America has been on the city and state’s to-do list for so long that it’s easy to miss that we’ve finally entered the active-shopping phase. Governor Kathy Hochul and, by extension, New York taxpayers, face a confusing set of choices - but at least we have choices, and they’re starting to establish a plan for an achievable, possibly even excellent, future station. So, then, we could always just mull the possibilities for another decade or two and keep patching up the old thing one soggy ceiling tile at a time. None will make the trip itself go faster, or give commuters more trains to choose from, or diminish the risk of a catastrophic tunnel closure under the Hudson that requires a whole different set of features and many more billions. All those options offer a more civilized environment to sprint through for the 5:55 to Massapequa. The pricing is squishy, the product specifications mystifying, and the delivery date vague, so you might consider a Frankensteinian combo of the two. How about the MTA’s $7 billion glass-box version with the two-block-long skylight over the waiting area? Alternatively, the private company ASTM has just floated a $6 billion stone-clad model with a grand Eighth Avenue entrance. Perhaps you’re in the market for a new train station - a new Penn Station, to be precise - but you’re finding it difficult to know which one to buy. View of the HOK/PAU design, facing Moynihan Station.
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