There’s been a lot of debate lately about the future of Penn Station and the blocks around it. But in every discussion, there’s an elephant in the room that no one wants to address — a big, round, colossal elephant sitting on top of the decapitated remains of a once-great station.
I’m talking, of course, about Madison Square Garden.
The conventional wisdom is that Penn can’t be fixed or improved and elevated into the beautiful public space New York City deserves without moving the Garden. And moving the Garden, the thinking goes, even with recent hints that the owners might consider it, is a nonstarter.
But what if moving Madison Square Garden were the best thing not just for the train station but for the arena itself — for those who perform and play in it, for those who own it and, most importantly of all, for those fans who crowd it?
We moved Yankee Stadium across the street. We moved Shea Stadium across the parking lot (and gave it a new name). Why not move Madison Square Garden across the street, where some want to build new office buildings? (Do we really need more office buildings?) A sports arena adjacent to a transit hub is immeasurably better than one sitting awkwardly on top of it.
Hear me out.
Madison Square is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, sports arenas in the country, a cold, cinderblock-lined vestige of another era of sports and entertainment. Opened in 1968, it is the oldest arena in the NBA and the NHL. The owners have done well with renovations in recent years, but that’s just a temporary solution. Sooner or later, likely sooner, this aging dowager will again show her years.
The sightlines inside are impressive but getting in and out is a labyrinthian challenge. Ask any fan. Concertgoers often start trickling out before the encore — sometimes missing their favorite songs — because they know the corridors will soon be jam-packed.
Putting the Garden on top of a train station was as bad for it as it was for the station. To get to your train after a show or game, you have to double back on yourself and go below where you just were.
When it was built, the Garden had to be lifted up to accommodate what remained of Penn. This was an impressive engineering feat, but it meant that portals for both fans and deliveries are not at grade. And naturally, because of this, you are limited as to how many stairs, elevators or escalators you have. Walking out through rows of opened doors onto the sidewalk, as one would do at a well-designed replacement, would be far easier.
Modern arenas are tremendously complicated pieces of infrastructure and depend on being serviced by trucks. They need a logical relation between their stage height and their truck-loading. The Garden doesn’t have that. I once watched the crew unload for a show by the band Phish. The trucks parked on the street. Then an army of forklifts showed up. They’d each pick up a piece of equipment, chug up a curved internal ramp, deposit it, and then come back down.
Those forklifts had to go back-and-forth in this wasteful middle step for everything Phish needed to be Phish: amps and lights and parts of the stage and other equipment. If it had been raining, it would have been a complete mess.
Imagine if a truck could just more or less back right up to the stage. And imagine, because of all this wasted time, how many shows can’t be accommodated.
Putting aside entertainment and sports, there is safety to consider. Penn Station occasionally experiences track fires. That certainly raises the potential for danger for the thousands of Knicks fans cheering in the stands above.
MSG was designed by the architect Charles Luckman, who was responsible for many notable structures. Alas, with all due respect, the Garden is, well…ugly. Perhaps there’s a charming irony that it resembles a gigantic hockey puck. But hockey pucks, remember, have not always been held up as beautiful objects for contemplation.
Some Brutalist architecture from the 1960s has some merit and should be preserved. But in many places, it’s being torn down.
And remember, the previous Madison Square Garden was on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Sts. This would be a smaller move than that.
So in a practical and aesthetic sense, let’s add a new idea into the ongoing discussions about fixing Penn Station. Moving the Garden is not a challenging obstacle. It’s an opportunity for a better sports and concert venue right next to a glorious new train station. Why can’t New York have the best of both worlds?
Washburn, an architect, was chief urban designer for New York City under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
