Developer Chosen for Penn Station Overhaul

Yesterday's announcement came from the US Department of Transportation and Amtrak, the latter of which is one of the four railroads that uses Penn Station. (The other, majority users are New Jersey Transit, New York City Subway, and Long Island Railroad.) When DOT Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced last month that the US government would be taking control of the Penn Station redevelopment from the New York State-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, it seemed likely that it would select the proposal to move Madison Square Garden (MSG), which sits atop the station and accordingly limits any redevelopment plans, and rebuild the station in a neoclassical manner. Instead, Duffy and Amtrak special advisor Andy Byford revealed that Penn Transformation Partners, led by Halmar and Skanska, have been selected from three finalists as the private master developer for the station's redevelopment.

Both Halmar and Skanska have been involved with transit projects in New York City, including the Second Avenue Subway and its extension. Their Penn Transformation Partners consortium also includes New York's PAU and Turin's ASTM, firms that worked on a proposal for the site a few years ago, when the station's redevelopment was in the MTA's hands. Their proposal kept MSG in place and reoriented the station's main entrance, among other fixes, and covered the whole in a unifying, modern expression. While many of the improvements from the three-year-old proposal remain in yesterday's announcement, it seems a modern exterior would be set aside in favor of “a new cladding [with] a classical look,” in line with Trump's “Make Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” executive order.

A bit of news not included in the announcement is the federal government's willingness to spend $8 billion on the project, enough to cover the entire cost (it was budgeted at $6 billion in 2023). The announcement does indicate that Amtrak and NJ Transit “will contribute additional funding to the project development work” (the MTA is neither contributing money nor participating in the planning) and groundbreaking should take place “before the end of 2027.”