Gov. Kathy Hochul reacted with jagged insouciance when the Trump administration snatched control of the slow-moving Penn Station redevelopment project from New York State last month.
“I want to thank the president,” she said, “for taking on the sole responsibility to deliver the beautiful new $7 billion station that New Yorkers deserve.”
Put aside the governor’s snarky use of President Trump’s favorite word — “beautiful” — and dreams of architectural glory like the original McKim, Mead & White station that was demolished 60 years ago. The future for Penn Station’s commuters and neighbors hinges not on aesthetics but on a wonky idea called through-running.
Through-running would allow New Jersey Transit trains to continue to Long Island and Long Island Rail Road trains to go on to New Jersey. It’s what Penn Station doesn’t have today, which is a big reason it’s so miserable for commuters.
Though Amtrak, the national railroad, owns Penn Station, it operates mostly as a terminal for commuter trains — a dead-end station in the middle of a busy city. After trains drop off and pick up riders at Penn, they go back to New Jersey or Long Island once the tracks clear up.
As trains dwell in the station, they take up tracks other trains could use, making commuting more miserable for the nearly 425,000 regional-rail passengers who used Penn each day before the pandemic. Penn’s platforms, more than a century old, are so narrow that passengers can’t exit and enter trains at the same time. So commuters hover by stairwells and escalators, waiting for others to disembark before they can board.
The idea of a terminal station made sense when New York designed its transit system more than a century ago to bring people to work in Manhattan in the morning and send them home in the evening. But that’s not the future or even the present: About a quarter of a million people, nearly 7 percent of city residents who work, are reverse commuters already, living in the city and working in the suburbs or in another nearby city, the Regional Plan Association estimates.
With through-running, the Trump administration could transform Penn Station’s commuting experience without needing to build a new station. As advocates at the civic group ReThinkNYC put it, the plan should be for people to be able to go from “anywhere to everywhere.” A resident of Brooklyn or Queens could ride to a job in New Jersey without a long wait to switch trains or a separate fare. A Bronx marketing executive who loses his Lower Manhattan job could search for jobs in Connecticut or New Jersey. Midtown and Lower Manhattan could build more housing, and suburbs and smaller cities could build more office buildings to welcome more high-paying jobs.
Through-running is the global standard: Transit systems in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Hong Kong operate this way. Yes, it will be expensive to bring New York up to standard — probably $10 billion, minimum. And yes, it will take time, most likely up to a decade, as contractors shut down a few of Penn’s 21 tracks at a time to realign tracks and lengthen and widen platforms.
But through-running could increase Penn’s train capacity at less cost and in less time than what Amtrak and New York State have wanted: to build another dead-end underground terminal after knocking down a thriving block and a half south of the station. That’s projected to cost nearly $17 billion.
Amtrak and Penn Station’s two commuter railroads have said through-running wouldn’t meet their goal of doubling train capacity. But several experts, including railroad and transit veterans, doubt the study’s conclusions and say through-running would create a far more efficient station. And would attaining a smaller but still significant expansion — rather than sticking to a hard goal.
“Why not take the opportunity to fix the damn thing once and for all?” Andy Byford, a veteran of several marquee global transit systems, including the New York subway system, said at a 2023 ReThink forum. “You’ve got not only the economic benefits of the city,” he noted, “but the knock-on effect of north, south, east and west of businesses popping up, of housing being developed.”
Through-running would create an urban good, and it would also prevent an urban harm by avoiding a project that would require the destruction of middle-class housing as well as office buildings filled with small businesses. In place of the current diversity of owners and renters would be supertall towers exempt from the city’s zoning code.
Though Ms. Hochul recently retreated from this Andrew Cuomo-era plan, saying she would not “destroy a neighborhood” for Penn Station, absent a different way to increase Penn’s capacity, this 1960s-style urban renewal project could return.
Providing billions of federal dollars to turn Penn Station into a through-running station may not seem very Trumpy; Mr. Trump’s predecessor was the rail guy.
But it can appeal to something Mr. Trump claims to care about: cutting through bureaucracy, by getting three separate railroads, with three separate sets of union work forces, to work together in building a unified rail system to make life easier for hundreds of thousands of commuters, including swing voters from Long Island and New Jersey.
It’s possible to reconfigure Penn’s tracks and platforms with Madison Square Garden still above it. One plan, proposed by the construction company Halmar, would demolish a small area of the Garden, its theater, to bring more light down and make it easier for passengers to reach platforms.
But it would be easier without the Garden there. Alex Washburn, a former chief urban designer for New York City, has proposed building a new Garden in an empty lot across Seventh Avenue where the Hotel Pennsylvania once stood and then demolishing the old Garden to make way for a new aboveground Penn.
If the Dolan family, which controls the Garden, doesn’t like the idea, the president could grasp that this type of project is why the Constitution recognizes the power of eminent domain; the founders designed our system of government so that we don’t need an authoritarian to achieve nice things.
New York has already spent a generation ingeniously hacking around Penn Station’s fatal flaw, the fact that it is underground. After more than two decades of planning, the state finally opened the Moynihan Train Hall across the street in 2021, relieving the surroundings for some passengers and, in the past few years, raising a ceiling in one hallway and allowing some natural light to flow down a new entrance there.
A big risk is that Mr. Trump will focus on speed to cut a ribbon on something superficial fast.
Another risk is that he will accomplish nothing and that under a future administration New York will need to attempt retaking control over the process in 2029.
Maybe there’s something to be said for sluggishness. It took just five years for the Pennsylvania Railroad company and the Madison Square Garden Corporation to smash the grand Doric-columned hall into pieces six decades ago and replace it with the utilitarian sports and concert arena.
A daylit Penn Station has been a memory for longer than it existed. As a third generation of passengers trudges the replacement Penn’s remaining sweaty catacombs, we’re still trying to undo the result of that efficient work unimpeded by pesky bureaucracy.
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Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
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