The battle between the Empire State Building and the proposed 15 Penn Plaza took center stage at a City Council hearing yesterday, and while the two sides duked it out over the skyline, Vornado, the developer of 15 Penn Plaza, dangled a transit carrot in front of the city politicians. David Greenbaum, the head of the company’s New York office division, said that Vornado is prepared to spend $100 million on improvements in and around Penn Station as long as the city gives final approval to the project. The Empire State Building owners claim that 15 Penn Plaza would block the sweeping views of the iconic Art Deco skyscraper and radically alter the skyline, but it’s hard to ignore $100 million in transit improvements. That money is, after all, hard to come by, and private developers should be contributing to transit as they plant buildings that will increase demand.
I reported on Vornado’s $100 million plan earlier this year, and the centerpiece is the reopening of the Gimbels Passageway underneath 33rd St. between 6th and 7th Avenues. The rest of their plans include wider staircases, a direct entrance to the express platforms at 32nd and 7th and a variety of new entrances and connections between the subway and PATH at 6th Ave. The City Council will vote on the future of 15 Penn Plaza tomorrow.
25 comments
I was already for this project because I feel like the city skyline always changes and it was the ESB being greedy. But with this 100M to Penn Station improvements, the city really needs to do this.
If someone can convince me otherwise, please do, but i am feeling this has to be done.
The design of the building needs to be improved. it’s fairly ugly
100M in improvements and (re)connection of 10 midtown lines is indeed tempting. The proposed building is not bad at all (a little too imposing IMHO). The tricky part is now whenever one is on the BQE stuck in traffic will not enjoy the iconic skyline on the city we hate to love with New Calvary cemetery at the foreground. There has to be some serious skepticism before approval: Penn station was demolished for “station improvements”. Are the intermediate advantages blinding us form deciding what is correct for the future?
In a way everything that has to do with Pennsylvania Station since the late 60’s is doomed to be controversial. We don’t want our kids to be blaming us for a crime of a skyscraper (or even a complete skyline) scale…
The city shouldn’t really be basing its development plans around how people stuck in traffic on the BQE will feel.
…but on how the user of New York experiences the skyline that makes us feel as New Yorkers. The bits and pieces of the great metropolis that remind us that is worth it.
Well said, +1
Usually, the people who gaze at the skyline are tourists, not New Yorkers.
Disagree. New Yorkers live with the skyline every day. The vast majority live in boroughs with a significant view of the skyline, whereas tourists gaze up at buildings from directly below them. The skyline means an enormous amount to New Yorkers and is why, despite the environmental bent of the City’s populace, we are astonished by the idea of turning off skyscraper lights to save energy, since doing so would fundamentally alter our perception of our City and our place in it. New Yorkers clearly care about teh skyline– every poll on the subject indicates this is so. While polls shouldn’t drive the decision, they clearly show that a real discussion of alternatives should be laid out before arriving at an irrevocable conclusion.
Do most New Yorkers even see the skyline easily? I know I haven’t; you can’t see anything from Upper Manhattan, or from the parts of Brooklyn and Queens I’m familiar with. In these parts people are more focused on the 5- and 10-story buildings nearby than on the 50- and 100-story buildings in Midtown.
Most New Yorkers don’t drive on the BQE.
The Empire State Building isn’t being torn down. It won’t become invisible.
Sounds great. The Gimbels passageway alone is a great reason to do this.
As for the tower, well, it’s not the most gorgeous thing I’ve seen, and the ESB is an icon. But it’s absurb to think that any one building in midtown Manhattan will provide unobstructed views from all angles forever (there are already plenty of parts of NYC that don’t have those views, anyway). And that’s a crazy basis on which to make planning decisions, unless you really want to think of the city as a museum rather than a living, functioning place.
In the end, the threat of the city becoming stagnant and uninteresting because we’re too afraid to build anything notable – while bigger, more exciting things than the ESB are cropping up all over the world, I might add – is much scarier than the idea of the ESB having a little competition. I’d say let the skyline continue to grow and evolve. Isn’t that how it got there in the first place?
Well said. It is almost like we are becoming a nation of no we cant.
Public transit funding? No we cant aford it.
A new building near the ESB? No the ESB is a sacred structure & cant be tutched.
New inferstructure projects? No we don’t have the money to fund them.
Tax breaks for the wealthyest 1% of americans? Yes ther’s plenty of money for that. Besides we don’t want these people pulling up stakes & end up moving to another country along with there wealth.
We have our priorities backwards.
“A new building near the ESB? No the ESB is a sacred structure & cant be tutched.”
This isn’t what people are saying. They are saying that a super-tall skyscraper two blocks from the City’s most famous building (and the World’s most historic skyscraper) may obstruct the views of the ESB so much that the equities fall on the side of topping the proposed building at a shorter height (this happens frequently), or finding an alternative spot for the building). People who oppose obscuring the ESB aren’t anti-development, they are pro-preservation of the City’s history. The notion that said people are obstructors of progress and modernity sounds eerily similar to barbs thrown their way when the original Penn Station was slated for demolition…
This reminds me so much of Philadelphia. For years, an unwritten rule forbade anything from being built that was taller than the statue of William Penn on top of City Hall. Then, One Liberty Place was built and exceeded that height, and it was followed by a bunch of other taller skyscrapers. Now, the iconic structure is hard to find in the skyline unless one looks straight down Broad or Market St.
Not sure, but I think that there’s room in this town for a few more skyscrapers. After all, it’s not like they’re building across the street from ESB. And what of the Dubai Tower? There was a period of time when we were dreamers and had the tallest buildings in the world. Now we’ve lost sight of this and are at eat others throats in the collective.
Wonder if the same arguements were made in the early 1930s when the huge, 1100 ft tall ESB went up in Murray Hill, which was a mostly residential neighborhood at the time, forever changing the character of the area.
If this new tower were right next door, or on the same block of 34th St between 5th and 6th aves, I’d say it was too close. But 33rd St and 7th Ave is two very wide avenues away, the equivalent of about 6 city blocks. I don’t think tourists and residents will run away from Midtown because they have to peek around a new buildng to see the ESB from Jersey or the BQE.
The $100 million is actually a horrible idea, because it enshrines the notion that public transit improvements should come from local private money. This may work for Penn Station, but it wouldn’t work for necessary improvements in Upper Manhattan or Eastern Brooklyn. If the MTA looks for a private source to fund a passageway from Harlem’s Metro-North station to the 4/5/6 station, it probably won’t find it.
Most large scale transit projects are going to end up being private public partnerships. There’s no other way to raise large sums of money right now. Besides who holds the checkbook at this moment? Albany? the MTA? I think not.
First, the private sector is as broke as the local governments. When there’s a recession, the only people who have a lot of money are national governments, which can run deficits. In France they recognize that, so the government has just dumped a few tens of billions into transit construction.
Second, PPPs are the reason those projects are so large-scale; they let each P blame the other for cost increases and demand more of other people’s money. Not for nothing, the countries that use PPPs the most – Britain and the US – also have the world’s most expensive capital construction.
The private sector is doing gangbusters. It has more cash on hand right now than it did at any time during the boom period.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/0...../index.htm
Though I share your deep skepticism about PPP’s and transit generally.
Money is fungible. Whatever the MTA doesn’t have to spend of its own money at Penn Station is available to be spent elsewhere. Of course, not all of the proposed $100 million worth of improvements were in the MTA’s plans, but surely some of them were (or should have been).
This may have just been an arbitrary example of yours, but I don’t see why there’s much of a need to connect the two stations on 125th. Park and Lex are much closer to each other than 6th and 7th, I don’t think the sidewalks on that part of 125th are overcrowded (although I could be wrong), and a connection between an underground station and an elevated station has to pass street level at some point anyway. That said, if Second Avenue Phase 2 happens, won’t the new terminal also function as a connection between the two stations?
There has to be a way to model different transfer penalties for in-system and out-of-system transfers. There is the issue of perception, for one: walking on the street means you’re transferring between different stations, not between two parts of the same station. A good thought experiment would be to compare the amount of walking with luggage air travelers do within an airport with the amount they’re willing to walk while transferring between train stations.
By the way, if you’re interested, I asked Jarrett Walker about whether a new connection would reduce the transfer penalty. He said he doesn’t know, and referred the subject to his commenter body. See developing thread here.
ESB is an icon, but it’s not a major work of art.
It was designed to be a commercial office building. It’s not a cultural institution, a monument to anything, a government building, or anything else terribly important. It was designed to be as tall as it can be for profit, hubris, and technological achievement. That technology and style has long been outdated. If someone can make money building a newer, more modern building that is taller, I think that is within the spirit of New York and the ESB itself.
15 Penn is a design bore, but it should be allowed to go ahead. It really was a shame when they made 53 west 53rd st lower its height to not compete with the ESB. It was a much better building.
Considering the access that everyone in the region has to this area, it’s really a surprise that Penn Station is not surrounded on all sides by buildings this tall.
lost and ignored with the proposed 15 Penn Plaza is the 7000* or so permanent jobs it will bring to a city that seems to be begging for jobs.
*as reported by the daily news today