The future of Madison Square Garden was examined by N.Y. TIMES art & design critic Michael Kimmelman, who wrote Penn Station “needs to grow, fast, with new passenger rail tunnels under the Hudson River to accommodate booming demand” and it is “hard to picture how any of that could happen as it should, with the Garden squatting on top of the station." New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “floated the idea of demolishing the 5,600-seat theater now beneath Madison Square Garden, to make way for a glassy entrance to Penn Station along the east side of Eighth Avenue.” This idea has also “occasionally surfaced over the years as a means of bringing light and air underground that’s less drastic than razing the whole Garden.” It would be a “feat of engineering that might end up costing” $1B -- which is a “plausible price tag for building a spanking-new, state-of-the-art Garden on some other site.” The Dolan family, which owns the Knicks and NHL Rangers, operates the arena “by virtue of a special city permit set to expire in seven years.” The Dolans “clearly show not the slightest sign that they take that deadline seriously -- unsurprisingly, what with City Hall and Albany declining to challenge them.” However, there are “good reasons that the Garden’s owners and shareholders should actually welcome another shot” at building at the James A. Farley Post Office across Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. Kimmelman: “Most important, a new arena -- which should cost the Dolans less to operate, with direct truck access to the floor of the arena at Farley -- could also come free, paid for by developers who, in return, would get retail and air rights at Penn Station. There are millions of valuable square feet of unused air rights where the Garden is now” (N.Y. TIMES, 1/13).
