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Stop me if you've heard this one before: We're going to get a new Penn Station, a gleaming example of public infrastructure befitting a transit hub in the richest country's richest city. On Wednesday, Trump's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy popped up and promised New Yorkers he'd make Penn Station great again, saying with typical bombast that the project would happen at the "speed of Trump," by which he meant it would start by the end of 2027. He also didn't rule out renaming it "Trump Station."
Duffy and Andy "Train Daddy" Byford, the former MTA head who now serves as a senior VP of Amtrak and who was tapped by the Trump admin to lead the redevelopment of Penn Station, announced concepts of a plan Wednesday, months after the president wrested control of the beleaguered redesign from the MTA in April. Per the New York Times, Amtrak "intends to partner with a private developer to renovate the dingy station, which sits beneath Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan, on an accelerated schedule." Interested developers are expected to submit proposals in the fall. By next May, so the timeline goes, one of those plans will be chosen and recommended to Amtrak's board. (One Trump-deferrent group already has a plan to trick the station out with "Roman columns" and "classical" architecture.)
But the big questions, which seem crucial to answer when rebuilding a highly trafficked station that sits directly underneath a giant basketball arena-slash-Billy Joel concert factory, remain unaddressed. How are they going to deal with Madison Square Garden? And who's going to pay for this?
When Hell Gate asked Rachael Fauss, a senior policy advisor at the good government advocacy group Reinvent Albany, she had the same questions.
