Westside Assemblyman Tony Simone is to be congratulated for wanting to save the block directly south of Penn Station from demolition for Amtrak’s foolish fantasy to become an unneeded dead-end terminal for NJTransit trains.
As this column has strenuously pointed out since 2016, the Block 780 nightmare for the proposed Penn South annex would unnecessarily destroy a neighborhood with homes and businesses and St. John the Baptist Catholic Church between Seventh and Eighth Aves. and 31st to 30th Sts.
There would be no benefit to New Yorkers, nor even Jersey rail commuters and it would cost $17 billion, of which not a cent has been identified. And that steep price tag is guaranteed to rise; when we started complaining, the cost for Penn South was $6 billion.
The bistate Gateway Development Commission, which is digging a new rail tunnel under the Hudson, must aim their two new tubes towards Penn Station proper and not Block 780, which must never be built. GDC officials cannot pretend that the decisions that they make now will not determine what happens years from now. They should assume that there will not be a Penn South.
Despite the lies of Amtrak, Penn can handle the four tubes from the west, just like Penn has always handled the four tubes from the east since 1910, coming in from Queens with LIRR and Amtrak service.
But the jealous railroads don’t want to share. The owner of Penn, Amtrak, wants NJT out of Penn and NJT wants to be in charge of its own Manhattan station.
Sorry, we are not going to rip up a big swath of Midtown based on a railroad mindset more befitting the cutthroat private companies owned by the robber barons of more than a century ago. Amtrak, NJT, Metro-North and the LIRR all trace their legacies to the long-defunct operators like the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Erie Lackawanna, but they are now all government agencies that should cooperate, not compete.
Simone, whose district covers the area around Penn Station, is calling his fellow legislators in Albany to amend the plan they approved at the behest of then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to remove the whole neighborhood from New York City’s zoning control and give it to the state. Simone wants to exclude Block 780 from this scheme, leaving it alone. As for the other parcels, Simone is pushing for housing instead of the big office towers that major landlord Vornado has backed away from.
Gov. Hochul is rightly focusing on fixing Penn itself and hopefully President Trump wants to support that. Penn can and should be upgraded to accommodate greater capacity, abrogating Amtrak’s seizure of Block 780. Rather than a wasteful stub-end terminal like Penn South, spare the neighborhood and spend far fewer billions and build new links to run trains from Jersey though Penn and on to Grand Central or out to Queens and Long Island, or both.
Simone understands all this and wants to remove Block 780 from Amtrak’s clutches. The governor and Simone’s colleagues in the Legislature should listen to him: New York can use more housing and doesn’t need a new train station, when there’s a perfectly good one that can be shared. Spare Block 780 from Amtrak’s wrecking ball, saving a community and billions of dollars.
