The City Planning Department on Monday recommended only a 10-year renewal of the special permit for Madison Square Garden.
That falls far short of the stadium’s requirement for a permanent authorization to operate at its current location atop Penn Station.
MSG received its first license in 50 years in 1963. Although the 22,000-seat stadium also sought a permanent license in 2013, the city council granted only a 10-year term, allowing the city to negotiate this change.
City zoning requires special permits for any stadium with more than 2,500 seats. The City Planning Commission — whose chairman, Dan Garodnick, also heads the city planning department — is expected to vote on the matter on Wednesday. Applications for special permits and text amendments are then submitted to City Council.
Garodnick noted that when Penn Station’s redesign plans are 30 percent complete, MSG must return to the city and certify that the venue is compatible with those plans.
Compatibility has been a pain point in these negotiations. In June, the MTA, Amtrak and NJ Transit submitted a report to the city planning agency arguing that loading operations at the venue were “incompatible” with Penn Station’s renovation plans. To be compatible, the stadium “must agree to cooperate in a property exchange,” including an interest in an abandoned taxiway on Eighth Avenue, the report said.
MSG countered that the railroad’s vision for Penn didn’t work. The venue’s owner, James Dolan’s MSG Entertainment, supports the alternative proposed by ASTM North America.
MSG appears to have won a battle: Efforts to move the entire arena (to achieve a Penn Station overhaul) have run out of steam.
In another shift, Gov. Kathy Hochul last month shelved plans for a multi-million-square-foot commercial development around the station and announced the start of the design process to overhaul Penn. This marks the start of work on a $58 million contract awarded to FXCollaborative Architects and WSP USA last year.
The continuation of the contract does not prevent ASTM from bidding on the project at a later date, but the company has indicated that it prefers to bid for the masterplan contract rather than simply joining as a design-build team.
The Adams administration required MSG to make several public realm improvements, including the removal of trucks from West 33rd Street, as a condition of the new special permit. The venue also hired the Newmark Group to find an off-site location to store the vehicles.
During Monday’s review meeting, Garrodnick acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding Penn’s redesign, but said New Yorkers cannot hold MSG’s public improvements hostage to the station’s overhaul.
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“We want to see these improvements in the short term. We have no control over when the rail agency will be 30% done with the design,” he said. “It could happen in a year, it could happen in seven years, it could happen in nine and a half years, it could never happen.”
A rate of 30% appears to be in line with the plan the rail agency is pursuing, unless the state changes course. The agencies will have FXCollaborative and WSP complete 30 percent of the design work, including environmental reviews, before bidding on the remainder of the project.
