Landmarks Preservation Commission. Credit: LPC.

Wide support voiced for designation of Coney Island pumping Station; potential extension to Douglaston Historic District and individual designation of Queens Apartment complex and religious structures proved contentious. On October 8, 2015, the Landmarks Preservation Commission held the first of four hearings meant to address the backlog of items on the Commission’s calendar added prior to 2010. Twenty-nine items were considered, in three groupings of multiple items clustered by borough. Each speaker had three minutes to testify for each batch, rather than on individual items. At the meeting, Landmark heard testimony on one batch of items in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn, and one in Queens. (more…)

Anthony Wood

Save our skyline. If not, tear down the Chrysler building and demolish the Empire State Building. If action isn’t taken these stars of the New York City skyline will be permanently eclipsed. If the public can’t see them, why preserve them? Even the preservation resistant Real Estate Board of New York would likely gasp at the notion of demolishing these two iconic New York landmarks. “The view of the New York skyline is nationally and internally renowned,” so stated Judge Richard McGill in a ruling against a Weehawken project that would have blocked it. The presence in the skyline of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building are as quintessentially New York as Central Park or the Statue of Liberty. The public can still feast their eyes on them from multiple vantage points, whether from the approaches to New York City or from its sidewalks. How much longer will that be the case? (more…)

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer

The decision to demolish Penn Station nearly 50 years ago haunts New York City today as we grapple with the need to expand our rail transit capacity in the 21st century. The current version of Penn Station, pinned beneath Madison Square Garden, is not merely an unsightly and unwelcoming entrance to our City, it is an overburdened facility that is incapable of being expanded with Madison Square Garden at its current location. That is why I am convinced that Madison Square Garden must move.

Ensuring that Penn Station could be modernized to meet future transit demands was the key issue facing my office when we recently reviewed Madison Square Garden’s request for a permit in perpetuity to continue operating in its present location. After an intensive review, I endorsed a 10-year permit and also recommended that we begin steps to relocate Madison Square Garden to a nearby site to pave the way for a badly-needed expansion of Penn Station. Fifty years ago, the station accommodated 200,000 daily passengers. Today it serves over 650,000—and the total will swell in future years.

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