Amtrak Willing to Look at Some New Plans that Might Spare 20+ establishments near Penn Sta.

Can Block 780 be saved?

In the fierce debate over the future of Penn Station and its neighborhood, that question moved center stage in recent days, when a senior executive of Amtrak said they would consider alternatives to their plan to take over the block.

Block 780 (as the city’s property tax system calls it) is a solid city block immediately south of Penn Station, bordered by Seventh and Eighth Avenues and West 31st and 30th streets. This prime location has put the block in the path of not one but two massive development proposals.

Because of that prime location, a whole collection of neighborhood businesses have been in the crosshairs of both a state redevelopment plan and Amtrak. The one square block features an array of bars, from the strip club Taboo to one of the last remaining Blarney Stones in the city. It also features one of the last $1 pizza shops in the city, as well as St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, which still runs a food pantry every Wednesday, and the Molly Wee pub which for over 40 years has been on the corner of Eighth and 30th. Also in the neighborhood is Tir Na Og, a restaurant which relocated from Eighth Ave. Another business well known to commuters is Tracks Sports and Oyster Bar, which was earlier forced from its longtime perch as a watering hole on the Long Island Railroad level of Penn Station. Block 780 is home as well to Gardenia Italian deli and, of course, chain stores from Panda Express to KFC and Starbucks. The dominant structure is a massive six story Park ‘n Lock, Meyer’s Parking Garage, which is one of the few buildings to run from one street to the next.

These businesses were, and still are, in danger of being forced to relocate or shut down by not one but two massive development projects.

That was because, first, Block 780 is the southern periphery of Governor Hochul’s General Project Plan to redevelop the neighborhood with massive office towers. Many political and community leaders have declared this plan dead, but a more precise description is probably “in limbo,” as EJ Kalafarski of Community Board Five put it, because of business conditions.

In any case, the second, separate, challenge to Block 780 is also the more immediate one. Amtrak has long eyed the site for an expansion of Penn Station’s tracks and platforms after a new rail tunnel is completed under the Hudson.

But at a conversation hosted by Community Board Five at MOMA on April 24, a senior executive of Amtrak, which owns Penn Station, said this southern expansion was not at all a fait accompli and that the railroad would over the next few months consider other options as part of a required environmental review.

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.

But Messick said Amtrak would also review at least two other options. One is to expand to the north, an idea that was part of a proposal, ultimately killed in 2010 by then New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, to build a new tunnel to the north of the existing tunnel and create an expanded station, effectively, “in Macy’s basement.”

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.

“We know we are going to have to look at through running,” Messick told the Community Board forum. “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.”

A fourth approach, to expand below the current track and platforms – as Grand Central Terminal has done to accommodate East Side Access for the Long Island Railroad–seems unlikely because of the soft soil and the challenge of bringing yet more passengers straight up through the already overcrowded station, Messick suggested.

At stake is the future of a hodgepodge of buildings that include residential lofts, apartments, a parking garage, a railway service building and a Roman Catholic church. “The 20 properties on Block 780 are held by 19 owners,” a study of the Penn Station neighborhood reported. “In addition, irregular lots comprise a third of the block (by acreage).”

Interestingly, 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 actually going to finish building is on the north side of 31st Street.

The retreat from the general redevelopment plan for the rest of the Vornado buildings still leaves the question of the Penn Station expansion.

“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,” said Samuel Turvey, proponent of a new above ground Penn Station.

Turvey attended the CB 5 forum and said afterward that Amtrak and others should have been more definitive that demolishing block 780 “is completely unnecessary.”

The debate about Penn Station has focused heavily on redeveloping the surrounding real estate and on whether Madison Square Garden should be forced to move. Layla Law-Gisiko, the chair of CB 5’s land use committee, said the forum was convened to turn the focus back on the core question of what kind of transit hub Penn Station could be.

She opened the evening by asking if anyone was satisfied with the present state of Penn Station, North America’s busiest rail station. Not a single hand was raised.

The forum also featured the first public appearance by any executive of ASTM, the Italian development company that has proposed to partner with the public agencies to rebuild Penn Station without moving The Garden.

The official, Peter E. Cipriano, senior vice president for North America, said the company was planning a full presentation, including its plan for financing the rebuilding, in June.

At a board meeting April 26 of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the chair, Janno Lieber, said he thought the ASTM plan, which involves buying the Madison Square Garden Theatre on Eight Avenue from MSG, was a waste of money.

“That’s not a good investment of MTA dollars, from my standpoint, and I feel strongly about it,” Lieber told the board meeting. “It makes no sense to invest a couple billion dollars, most of which will go to Madison Square Garden because the premise is to buy out the Hulu theater, take it all apart, and build a grand entrance to Penn Station while leaving Madison Square Garden in place.”

Amtrak owns Penn Station but its two biggest users are the MTA’s Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit.

At the CB 5 forum, Messick said that Amtrak was “agnostic” about moving the Garden, although she said she was sure the railroad would find good things to do with the “head space” if the Garden’s owner, James Dolan, did decide to move. The Garden’s permit to operate a large arena above Penn Station expires on July 28 and CB 5 has voted to recommend the Garden move within three years, so the rebuilding of the station and of its platform and track operations can all be integrated.

Messick’s main focus was on the extraordinarily complex operations of the station itself, with 21 tracks and 1300 daily trains moving in and out.

It is, she said, “a station that was built over 100 years ago by the Pennsylvania Railroad for inter-city travel at the time and a small portion of long island commuter service, which over the years morphed into three times as many passengers and more than double the number of train movements and now is struggling under the weight of all that use.”

The new tunnel will allow for up to 24 more trains an hour from New Jersey. But where to put those trains and their passengers on platforms already dangerously cramped and overcrowded has prompted the discussion of expansion.

“One of our goals is to increase rail ridership and to bring more people into New York City and to give more New Yorkers access to places they want to go without cars,” Messick said.

Amtrak is preparing the various potential expansion plans for environmental review, she said. One big question will be what is feasible from an engineering point of view.

“These commuter trains are up to 1200 feet long,” Messick explained. “So they stretch longer than a Manhattan block. And they require a ton of room. And they don’t turn on a dime. They turn very slowly. So they don’t like to go up hills and they don’t like to descend grades and they can’t go up and turn at the same time.

“The whole challenge is how do you bring these incredibly lengthy trains into Manhattan. Find space for them. Find space for platforms, so we don’t replicate what we have at Penn Station.”

The new platforms should meet accessibility and fire codes--not always the case in the current station--and “have enough room to navigate comfortably, wait on the platform as the train is coming into the station, potentially pre-board,” she said.

“So all of that requires a ton of physical space. We are trying to develop concepts that would connect to this new tunnel and meet those requirements of bringing in up to 24 new trains into Manhattan per hour.”