The Moynihan Station Towers That Weren’t

One could probably make a book—or at least a pretty big pamphlet—out of renderings associated with the chronically immobile project to expand and renovate Penn Station, now known as Moynihan Station. The project has morphed repeatedly since its birth in the early 1990s but failed to do little other than pay out consultant fees and inspire newspaper articles.

So here’s a glimpse at a rendering we hadn’t seen before today (it popped up in a Wired New York forum), of a set of 1,200-foot-plus towers that would have gone in place of Madison Square Garden, had the whole project ever come to fruition.

The rendering, which an Empire State Development Corporation spokesman dates as circa-early 2007, illustrates the plan to give Penn Station a redo and move the Garden across the street to the Farley Post Office. The Penn redo would have given the developers, Related and Vornado, a huge zoning bonus, allowing them to build 5 million square feet of office space above.

That, of course, was before the two mega-developers realized that, in fact, it turns out to be kind of difficult (or near-impossible) to erect two skyscrapers taller than the Empire State Building over a working train station, causing them to shift course.

Then that whole plan collapsed, and now no one really knows what’s going on with the project.

At the time, the architects on the plan were SOM, Norman Foster and KPF.