Hochul Backs Cuomo’s Penn Station Pet Project And Midtown Mega Project, With A Twist

Governor Kathy Hochul plans to forge forward with a redesign of Penn Station and the surrounding neighborhood, but will put her own spin on the project first proposed by her predecessor Andrew Cuomo. The Hochul plan, first reported by Bloomberg and sent to The New York Times ahead of the official announcement Wednesday afternoon, will not immediately require removing all the buildings on a city block south of Penn Station, but will add more pedestrian space and raise the low ceiling of Penn Station, while eventually still expanding the number of train tracks at Penn.

"This area is is the beating heart of our city," Hochul said during a press conference Wednesday, noting it's the busiest transit hub in North America. She called her plan a way to make "a Penn Station worthy of New Yorkers."

In addition to the governor calling it "depressing," "crowded," and "confusing," Regional Plan Association president Tom Wright said commuters face "daily humiliation" at Penn Station and MTA Acting Chairman Janno Lieber said it was a "reviled" space.

The renovated Penn Station would be a single level train hall with higher ceiling heights--which are seven feet in some places now--with a 450-foot-long concourse, bigger than Moynihan Station and Grand Central Terminal combined, she said.

Cuomo's plan featured 10 new towers, and the Times reports Hochul's plan would still build 10 new towers, just that they would be reduced in size by 7%, still making a larger footprint than Hudson Yards. Hochul also reportedly will propose 540 permanent affordable housing units in the 1,800 total residential units, which is consistent with what officials presented in July. (The definition of affordable has yet to be explained.)

Both plans also call for creating nine new tracks and five new platforms at Penn Station, which would primarily be used by NJ Transit. However, Hochul emphasized that her version would not be as disruptive to the neighborhood as before.

Hochul signaled her interest in more immediate Penn Station upgrades on Sunday, during an unrelated press conference, saying, "Penn Station itself needs to be redone. And I’m not waiting until 2035 for the tunnel to be done to start talking about the Penn Station experience, which is substandard.”

One aspect in which the plans seem to diverge is the creation of public space. Cuomo’s plan would have created a 30,000 square foot pedestrian plaza between buildings on West 30th and 31st streets. Hochul’s plan appears to add eight acres of public space, according to the Times.

Hochul said that the plan would take four to five years, at a price tag of $6-7 billion. She said urgency was needed, because costs go up as projects get delayed. She did confirm that some buildings south of Penn Station would need to be demolished, but not at the scale as Cuomo had proposed earlier; the space would be needed for development, which would help fund the project. Cuomo’s plan expected to use a mix of air rights, leases on space, and tax abatements to generate funds.

The track and station expansion at Penn is part of the Gateway project, and was expected to be funded in part by the federal government, and with New York and New Jersey splitting the costs.

Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who won a city council seat Tuesday night had opposed the Cuomo plan on the grounds of how it would be funded, and the lack of affordable housing. Coming off her election victory Wednesday, she praised Hochul’s new tack.

“I commend Governor Hochul for announcing that critical Penn Station improvements are moving ahead and will be taking precedence in the state’s plan for the neighborhood," Brewer wrote in an email. “Penn Station improvements are long overdue and will improve our region’s transit infrastructure. I look forward to working with the state on the plan’s financing, open space, collaboration, and engagement with the community.”

A coalition of advocates has been rallying against the proposal. It notes the area doesn’t need more office space, especially with so much vacant office space already.

“This is a neighborhood with a character, a history and a soul,” Simeon Bankoff, Executive Director of the Historic Districts Council, wrote back in April. “It cannot be treated as a blank space for ill-conceived and unsustainable real estate power fantasies.”

Lynn Ellsworth, of Humanscale NYC, which includes community and civic groups concerned about overdevelopment, said in an email to Gothamist/WNYC that the project does not appear to be "chang[e] the Cuomo vision enough to make the project different.  From what I read in the Times, this is not a significant change in the project."

However, she added, "It’s great that she doesn’t want to demolish some part of the neighborhood."

Hochul has already halted other Cuomo-era infrastructure projects, like the LaGuardia AirTrain. While lawmakers and advocates are calling on her to kill the project outright, instead she asked the Port Authority to review options, other than the $2 billion AirTrain.

Unlike the AirTrain, which had already cleared the final federal hurdle, the Penn Station redevelopment plans are still in the early planning process and the state is preparing the federally required Environmental Impact Statement.

This article has been updated to clarify that it was RPA president Tom Wright who said Penn Station provided "daily humiliation" to riders while MTA Acting Chair Janno Lieber was the one to use the word "reviled" to describe the hub.