MTA floats plans to get more light in Penn Station without moving MSG

More On:

penn station

Curtis Sliwa rips ‘two dopes’ de Blasio and Cuomo while launching mayoral run

Activist says she’s been bullied while fighting Cuomo’s ‘disastrous’ Penn Station plan

Female subway assailant tells Penn Station vic, ‘God bless you’

Chivalry isn’t dead: Man lifts woman over NYC slush puddle after snowstorm

Transit officials are mulling proposals to bring more light into Penn Station’s dreary corridors — without having to move Madison Square Garden, according to a new report.

MTA exec Janno Lieber presented two concepts on Friday to “city, state, community and advocacy leaders,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Under one proposal, 40 percent of the station’s upper level would be eliminated — creating a single-level facility with 40 foot-high ceilings. The concourses would be widened to make up for the lost capacity.

The other concept would keep the upper level in place but create an atrium in a former Amtrak waiting area. Both revamps would transform the station’s blueprint into a grid, the report said.

“You are lost in this enclosed box,” Lieber told WSJ. “What we want to do in either version is to open it up.”

Lieber did not provide a cost estimate for either proposal, the Journal said. He told the paper any Penn Station revamp could be funded as part of the $30 billion Gateway Program, which includes building a new tunnel under the Hudson River.

Penn Station is owned by Amtrak, whose president told the WSJ the railroad is working to develop a “consensus master plan” for the station, which served 600,000 people daily before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In January, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced plans to dramatically expand the Long Island Rail Road’s footprint at the station by annexing an entire block just south of the station to make room for eight new tracks.

View Slideshow

Source: Read Full Article