City Planning Director Dan Garodnick just finished a major citywide rezoning plan to produce more housing, which is being rightly applauded by all sides. He and the Department of City Planning now need to have restored to their local authority the zoning of the area around Penn Station, which the Legislature and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo wrongly bigfooted into Albany’s control over this vital section of Midtown.
The pro-housing zoning changes approved by the City Council on Thursday (which took effect immediately) was years in the making and due to the work of many people: Mayor Adams and Council Speaker Adrienne Adams at the top, along with First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer and Councilmen Rafael Salamanca and Kevin Riley, the chairs of the land use and zoning committees, were essential. And countless aides and staffers deserve credit.
Garodnick and the Department of City Planning he leads were instrumental. Garodnick, from the time that Eric Adams appointed him at the start of the administration in 2022, was looking at ways to update the city’s 1961 zoning rules. We remember several decades ago a previous planning director telling us that the 1961 zoning resolution needed to be modernized, but it never happened. Now it has.
This wasn’t Garodnick’s first time at a big rezoning. When he was a councilman in 2014, he led the East Midtown Steering Committee, which crafted new zoning regulations for the area around Grand Central, balancing transportation improvements, public space enhancements, new commercial office construction and historic preservation. It worked stunningly well and Garodnick’s success was a preview of his future work.
Just last week came the final approvals for rebuilding the horrible and disgusting Port Authority Bus Terminal. At first, the Port offered their own plan from on high, but New Yorkers rightly complained and so a cooperative approach was adopted. What emerged was a better outcome, a compromise that was accepted by the community, with Garodnick at the fore.
The same smarts that Garodnick brought to Port Authority, the Grand Central environs and the citywide housing expansion should be applied to the sorry state around Amtrak’s Penn Station.
But in 2018, Cuomo, envisioning a massive deal with the neighborhood’s dominant real estate baron, Vornado, pushed the Legislature to strip the city of its zoning power in the blocks around Penn. Included in the swath was Block 780, full of homes and businesses and a Catholic church, which lies directly south of Penn and which Amtrak has been eying for its unneeded train annex called Penn South, once pegged at $6 billion and most recently being estimated at $17 billion.
But Vornado has given up on building huge towers, which were to finance the project, leaving the Cuomo plan dead. Albany should return the zoning authority back to the city, where it always belonged.
Gov. Hochul was at City Hall Thursday for a celebration after the Council voted in the zoning change. She wants Penn Station fixed up and the community improved. Garodnick is the perfect man to do it, without wasting $17 billion and plowing under a neighborhood as Amtrak is scheming.
Albany must repeal the Cuomo power grab.
