On March 23, the New York Daily News ran an editorial about the Gateway Program, which is building new infrastructure in New York City and New Jersey on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC). The editorial was an opinion about a new development that could change the Gateway Program’ trajectory, specifically, the part about Penn Station. It immediately set off debate among local advocates.
The Daily News endorsed a statement that Gov. Kathy Hochul had made, saying that she would save Block 780, located immediately south of Penn Station. The Gateway plan would have knocked it and adjacent buildings down to make room for a new stub-end terminal to be known as Penn South. In fact, the Pennsylvania Hotel, where Glenn Miller enshrined its phone number, Pennsylvania 6-5000, into musical fame, has already fallen victim to the wrecking crews. So, it might now be time for some changes to the Gateway Program.
Hochul’s remarks were reproduced within the content of the editorial. They were not part of an event about the Gateway Program but came from a YouTube video from an event on March 19, concerning $270 million in state grants for building 1,800 affordable housing units across the state. The video contains a Q&A session with reporters, and the part about Penn Station and Gateway can be found at the beginning. The editorial quoted the pertinent parts of Hochul’s remarks accurately. They came in response to a question about common ground that she might have with POTUS 47 about transit in and around New York City.
Hochul said, “We are doing Penn Station. I’m supposed to show [POTUS 47] the plans; that will be [on] my next trip down [to Washington]. I’m excited about that. We have $1.2 billion committed. I said about $6 billion from the federal government would be enormously helpful. A little wince there, but I won’t take that as a no.” She mentioned that Amtrak had a “different vision” from hers about a new Penn Station: “The challenge has been that Amtrak had a different vision. I want to redo the station. I want it to be magnificent. And if you go to the station there are major parts that have been redone already … It’s beautiful. But there’s parts that are still behind. I want to bring in the natural light. We have a great plan. I get updates literally every week on our progress because I’m impatient.”
The governor then turned the discussion to Block 780 by linking it to recent trends in real estate in Midtown Manhattan: “We had to get everybody really heading down the same tracks here and that was hard because Amtrak was rather insistent that it be this larger 780 Block. And I said, ‘I’m not going to destroy this neighborhood.’ We can do the station itself. Make it something that we are proud of without having to destroy a neighborhood in the process. Because I don’t think the demand is there for office that was once there … And I’m not going to destroy a neighborhood in the process. I had to shift a narrative and a focus that was headed down one way, pull them back and say, ‘This is how we are going to do it.’ So, I’m excited about this.”
Block 780, named for its designation on New York City’s tax map, is located directly south of Penn Station, between 30th and 31st Streets, running from Seventh to Eighth Avenues. It was controversial 15 or more years ago, when a previous tunnel project, originally called Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) and later the Trans Hudson Express (THE) Tunnel. A previous plan proposed by Amtrak on Sept. 18, 2008 showed an underground station at the Block 780 location. The current plan for a seven-track stub-end terminal, to be called Penn South, was introduced when the Gateway Program was first announced on Feb. 7, 2011. Current plans for Gateway still call for Penn South, although there has been some talk that the project could be changed to keep the neighborhood including Block 780 and nearby areas from being demolished. This talk apparently has just gotten a boost from New York’s governor.
On May 1, 2023, Michael Oreskes (a former Daily News, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Associated Press and National Public Radio editor who according to Wikipedia left NPR in 2017 amid allegations of sexual harassment) reported in The Spirit, a community newspaper serving the Upper West Side of Manhattan, that Amtrak was considering a plan for through-running at Penn Station as an alternative to demolishing the neighborhood, in a story that bore the headline Amtrak Willing to Look at Some New Plans that Might Spare 20+ establishments near Penn Station. He reported: “The Amtrak executive, Petra Messick, director of planning for Amtrak’s Gateway program, said the southern expansion of Penn Station into Block 780 is ‘the most logical place to make a connection’ to the new tunnel because it will run to the south of the existing Hudson River tunnel. That tunnel was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad more than 100 years ago and has been in urgent need of repair since Superstorm Sandy.” He reported that Messick said that Amtrak would consider other options, including a tunnel form the north that was part of the former plan that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie killed in 2010, and also another alternative, as Oreskes reported: “A third approach that will be examined, Messick promised, is to run trains through the station, rather than back and forth from the station, effectively integrating New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road. This would increase the number of trains that can use the existing station, although it would require the two railroads to cooperate in a massive reorganizing of their operations.”
Oreskes was reporting on a Community Board forum at which Messick made her remarks, including: “We know we are going to have to look at through running … That is a concept that the community has really identified as something that we should take a serious look at. So, we will absolutely study that.” According to Oreskes, Messick had downplayed the option of connecting Penn Station to Grand Central Terminal, Alternative G of the original ARC Project, which was removed from consideration in 2003, although some advocates still support a version of it as the most useful option for most riders.
Support for Block 780 Preservation
Various advocates have called for keeping the neighborhood intact, often as part of their advocacy for a plan to do something other than building the proposed stub-end Penn South station. One of the most vocal is Samuel Turvey, President of ReThinkNYC, a civic organization. Oreskes quoted Turvey in his report as saying that demolishing Block 780 “is completely unnecessary … Both the Governor’s General Project Plan (GPP) and Amtrak and the other railroads’ plans for this site are obvious, they plan to demolish it.”
Reacting to the editorial, Turvey told Railway Age: “I think the governor made the right decision, and I’ll be very interested to see how this is formalized and reduced to a legally binding position for the State of New York. It still leaves the block at risk of the railroads claiming that it’s the only viable space to provide needed capacity at the station. And we continue to believe that the FRA should insist that a bona fide independent study of through-running options within the footprint of Penn Station be commissioned and funded with parts of two grants of $72 million each that the railroads received in the last weeks of the Biden Administration. There should be knowable facts, and we’re going to continue to press for this independent review.”
The Midtown South Community Council reported that the City Club of New York endorsed Hochul’s call for saving the block: “The City Club of New York strongly endorses Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to reject the demolition of Block 780—the block immediately south of Penn Station bounded by 30th and 31st Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues—for station expansion. This decisive step preserves a historic neighborhood, shifts the transit conversation toward operational efficiency, and challenges transportation leaders to reimagine rail capacity without unnecessary demolition … Preservation of Block 780 necessitates a complete reevaluation of the existing General Project Plan (GPP). The City Club calls for an independent, transparent assessment within the next six months, bringing together community stakeholders, transportation advocates, urban planners, and international transit experts. This assessment must include rigorous analysis of successful through-running models in comparable global cities, such as Philadelphia’s Center City Commuter Connection, London’s Thameslink and Paris RER.”
Other community activists have been concerned about losing specific buildings. Michelle Young described a campaign to save the powerhouse across 31st Street from Penn Station in Untapped New York on March 11: “This block, 780, has already survived two demolition attempts as part of the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) in the 1990s and the Penn South plan in 2015.”
Office Space Demand Declines
One of the effects of the COVID-19 virus that struck five years ago is a decline in commuting to city offices, including those located in Midtown Manhattan. Consequently, demand for office space has also declined, and it is unclear whether it will recover to pre-COVID levels. Fewer employees are commuting five times a week into the office, as we have reported regularly here in Railway Age. Real estate media has covered the story in much more detail, in New York City and other urban markets.
A plan backed by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (now attempting a revival of his political career by potentially running for New York City mayor) would have built several super-tall office buildings around Penn Station, a project that would have generated a great deal of new office space at the southwest corner of Midtown Manhattan but would have also been expensive to build. With demand for office space down, the real estate industry has lost interest in such megaprojects. Oreskes called Block 780 a “hodgepodge of buildings” with 20 properties owned by 19 different entities but reported: “Not one of those 19 owners is Vornado Realty, the largest property owner in the neighborhood and the biggest beneficiary of the redevelopment plan, originally proposed by former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Vornado has said that because of sagging office use and high interest rates it won’t be going forward, for now, with any of the office towers conceived in the governor’s plan. One of the two office towers that Vornado is going to finish building is on the north side of 31st Street.”
A former plan called for Penn Station to be surrounded by nine or ten skyscrapers, many of them 80 or 90 stories tall. The plan was to create a new center of office activity at the corner of Midtown near Penn Station for easy commuting. Circumstances have changed, though, and the vacancy rate of Manhattan office space has increased, which means there is no need for massive office development in Midtown. Given demographic changes, such as Baby Boomers retiring and new work customs, such as fewer employees spending five days a week at the office, it appears unlikely that demand for office space will again reach pre-COVID levels. New technology enabled many workers to do their jobs from home or another remote location during the pandemic, and this practice has continued.
The Daily News Gets Louder
While the Daily News has never liked Gateway management’s plan for Penn Station, especially the proposed Penn South stub-end terminal south of the existing station, Hochul’s move appeared to boost the paper’s enthusiasm, according to the editorial: “We are excited, too. When Hochul returns to the White House with her plans, she should bring photos of Grand Central [Terminal], which New York has controlled for decades and done a magnificent job of restoring to its full splendor to compare with sorry Penn, which is Amtrak’s responsibility. We suggest pictures of Penn’s ridiculously designed multilevel NJT concourse crowded during the p.m. rush and the derelict Hilton Passageway, lined with Amtrak’s storage rooms.”
The editorial also considered White House-ousted Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner as an impediment to what it believed to be a better way to improve Penn Station: “At the track level, to allow for 12-car lengths and to make Moynihan accessible to all of Penn, the shorter Tracks 1-4 used by NJT must be extended west. NJT has refused, believing that they were departing to Block 780. No more. Also, the different fiefdoms within Penn for each railroad must be abolished, creating a single, unified station … Achieving this has been impossible because Amtrak, with only 5% of the trains and passengers at Penn, dictates what happens in the station. And Amtrak is incapable and inept. That must end, and [POTUS 47] should force the now-decapitated Amtrak to get out of the way and let New York be in charge. The same for the four tubes under the East River that are used by the LIRR. Hand their ownership over the MTA. That goes as well for the two tubes under the Hudson, which could also go to NJT or the Port Authority.”
Advocates in the area have expressed differing views. Some believe that Hochul opened the door for a better plan than Gateway’s to emerge. Others believe that the Gateway plan, which included demolition of Block 780 and other places near Penn Station and construction of Penn South, made sense. Those who favor through-running see Penn South as wasteful and inefficient, even a continuation of 19th century railroading in the middle of the nation’s largest city with its greatest number of local trains.
The Daily News editorial called for through-running and for short dwell times at Penn Station to increase the flow of trains through the station which, in turn, increases capacity: “Without Block 780, Amtrak’s Gateway, which is aiming its two new Hudson tubes toward 780, must be altered. The alignment of the new rails in New Jersey, now separate and parallel to the south of the existing Northeast Corridor, must instead straddle the NEC, allowing the doubling of the number of trains coming into Penn from the west. Hochul should get the bistate Gateway Development Commission to make the change.”
The editorial also endorsed AmeriStarRail’s call for short dwell times, concluding this way: “AmeriStarRail would require that all Amtrak trains dwell for only two minutes in Penn, like they do in other NEC stations. They would pull in, release passengers and take on new ones and leave immediately. When shown, NJT and LIRR liked the plan, but said Amtrak would never agree. Well, [POTUS 47] and Duffy can now make Amtrak agree.”
GDC Limits Comments
The Gateway Development Commission (GDC) did not specifically comment on Hochul’s remarks, but spokesperson Steve Sigmund told Railway Age: “We’re not commenting because GDC is solely responsible for the construction of the Hudson Tunnel Project. That project is building nine miles of reliable track and tube connecting New York and New Jersey, and then fully rehabilitating the existing 115-year-old-tubes, so that there are ultimately four reliable, 21st century tubes to serve millions of riders for the next century.”
Still, it looks like, under the new circumstances, Penn South will not be the answer. There are issues of capacity and throughput, and circumstances in the workplace and on the railroads have changed in recent years, with the changes appearing now to come faster than ever. If Hochul is questioning the need to demolish Block 780, are there other assumptions that should be questioned? One is the expressed need for 48 trains to arrive at Penn Station during the busiest 60 minutes of the morning commuting peak. Are that many trains necessary, when there are other available terminals? It appears not, especially considering the high capital cost of accommodating that many trains (as opposed to 32 or 36) and the high opportunity cost of building Penn South instead of other important projects.
I’ll keep an eye on the situation, but Gov. Hochul might have forced some changes in the Gateway Program by her stand against demolishing Block 780.
