City Planning recommends 10-year permit for MSG

The Department of City Planning on Monday recommended renewing Madison Square Garden’s special permit for only 10 years.

That falls well short of the arena’s request for permanent authority to operate in its current location on top of Penn Station.

MSG’s first permit, for 50 years, was approved in 1963. Though the 22,000-seat arena also sought a permanent permit in 2013, the City Council only granted it 10 years, creating leverage for the city to negotiate for changes this time around.

City zoning requires a special permit for any arena with more than 2,500 seats. The City Planning Commission — whose chairman, Dan Garodnick, also heads the Department of City Planning — is expected to vote on the matter Wednesday. The applications for the special permit and text amendment then head to the City Council.

Garodnick noted that when plans for the Penn Station redesign are 30 percent complete, MSG must return to the city and prove that the arena is compatible with those plans.

Compatibility has been a bit of a sore spot in these negotiations. In June, the MTA, Amtrak and NJ Transit submitted a report to City Planning arguing that the arena’s loading operations are “incompatible” with plans to renovate Penn Station. To be compatible, the arena “must agree to collaborate on property swaps,” including its interest in a defunct taxiway on Eighth Avenue, according to the report.

MSG has countered that the rail agencies’ vision for Penn does not work. The arena’s owner, James Dolan’s MSG Entertainment, favors an alternative floated by ASTM North America.

MSG does appear to have won one fight already: The push to move the entire arena — to allow for a complete transformation of Penn Station — has lost momentum.

In another switch, Gov. Kathy Hochul last month shelved plans for millions of square feet of commercial development around the station and announced the start of the design process for overhauling Penn. That marked the beginning of work under a $58 million contract awarded last year to FXCollaborative Architects and WSP USA.

The continuation of that contract doesn’t prevent ASTM from bidding on the project later, but the firm has expressed a preference to bid on a master planner contract rather than simply come on board as a design-build team.

The Adams administration is requiring MSG to make several public realm improvements, including removing trucks from West 33rd Street, as a condition of the new special permit. The arena has also hired the Newmark Group to find off-site locations to store vehicles.

During a review session Monday, Garodnick acknowledged the uncertainty around Penn’s redesign, but said New Yorkers cannot hold MSG’s public improvements hostage to the station overhaul.

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“We want to see these improvements in the near term. We have no control as to when the rail agencies will have a 30 percent design complete,” he said. “That could happen in a year, it could happen in seven years, it could happen in nine and a half years, it could happen never.”

The 30 percent-mark seems to coincide with the plan being pursued by the rail agencies, unless the state changes course. The agencies would have FXCollaborative and WSP complete 30 percent of the design work, including an environmental review, and then bid out the rest of the project.