Will Penn Station be Trump Station? Will MSG move? What you need to know about the sweeping redesign 37%
By Evan Simko-Bednarski0%
4/25/2026, 9:35:54 PM
Topics: Infrastructure, Urban Development
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Recency Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 21.3% saturation with 231 hits. Analysis detected 1,566 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,082 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.8% and a BS Rank of 37% (12,999 of 20,518 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 63.40% of the article peer group.
Eight months after the federal government announced an aggressive timeline for the long-debated rebuilding of Penn Station, plans for the nation’s busiest train hub are expected to be submitted next week.
Former NYC Transit head Andy Byford — President Trump’s new Penn Station Czar — has promised New Yorkers a “top-to-bottom transformation of every aspect of Penn Station.”
So when will New Yorkers get a sense of what it will look like?
Will Madison Square Garden actually move?
And will the President add to his portfolio of eponymous New York buildings?
Here’s what you need to know:
Why are they rebuilding Penn Station, anyway?
Penn Station’s original Beaux Arts design — the crown jewel of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s political maneuvering and engineering acumen — was demolished in 1963 in a bid to save the railroad by selling the station’s air rights.
Madison Square Garden then built its arena atop the station, leaving commuters with the station’s old subterranean track layout and a series of cramped and confusing corridors in an underground warren to get to one’s train.
Meanwhile, ridership at the station has tripled since the 1960s.
Rebuilding Penn Station has been a white whale for transit advocates and civic leaders since the 1990s.
Their efforts have led to expanding the station into the former James A.
Farley Post Office, which had been built to match the appearance of the original Penn Station.
That complex, now known as the Moynihan Train Hall and primarily meant to serve Amtrak passengers, opened in 2021.
Then-Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed a redesign of the main station itself, which ultimately stalled out amid post-pandemic economic fluctuations.
There are a lot of players but who’s in charge of the plan?
Amtrak, the federal passenger railroad, owns Penn Station — which it inherited from the Penn Central railroad, corporate successor to the once-mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, in 1976.
While the MTA, which controls the Long Island Rail Road, one of three railroads reliant on the hub, headed up a redesign plan in 2022, Trump’s Department of Transportation took the project over last year.
Amtrak was given the lead, and President Trump selected Andy Byford — the former NYC Transit head — to lead an expedited redesign process.
Trump himself is expected to have the final say.
What happens next?
When will we know what the new station will look like?
This coming week will be a busy one in the Penn Station saga.
At the start of the year, Amtrak short-listed three construction consortia and invited those developers to send in formal plans for review by a technical committee chaired by Byford.
Their proposals are due next week, on Thursday, April 30.
From there, the committee is expected to present their selection to a closed session of the Amtrak board in May.
With the board’s blessing, Byford will then bring the selection to the White House, where the president is expected to make the final decision..
Only then will the selected design be made public — an announcement expected to take place in June.
Byford has promised to have shovels in the ground by the end of 2027 — what U.S.
Deputy Secretary of Transportation Steven Bradbury called operating “on ‘Trump time.’”
What do we know about the three proposals?
None of the proposals are currently public.
But two of the three shortlisted developers have had plans in the public eye before.
Penn Transformation Partners is headed up by Halmar, the U.S. arm of Italian firm ASTM Group, which has been hawking a Penn Station plan for several years.
The Halmar/ASTM plan is expected to involve a “grand entrance” on Eighth Ave. in space purchased from Madison Square Garden, but otherwise the sports arena would stay in place.
The second group, Grand Penn Partners, is the corporate face of a plan to rebuild Penn Station as a Neo-classical complex.
As previously reported by The News, the Grand Penn plan is backed by Tom Klingenstein — chairman of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute and a major Trump donor — who has written previously in favor of Classical architecture as “anti-woke.”
The Grand Penn plan is expected to involve a grand, columned entrance on Seventh Ave., reminiscent of the original Penn Station, and a park between the new station and Moynihan Train Hall.
Those proposals — included in a 2025 plan put forth by Grand Penn — would require the demolition of Madison Square Garden.
The third group is Penn Forward Now, a consortium funded by investment manager Fengate.
But its plans are a mystery.
A short-lived website associated with the plan listed architectural, financial, planning and building firms connected with the effort, but no renderings or descriptions of a vision for Penn Station.
Are they still talking about moving MSG?
The future of the arena will depend on the particulars of the plan that’s ultimately selected.
But Trump recently told the New York Post that he wanted the Garden to stay.
The arena has “the best sightlines, the best sound,” the President told New York’s other newspaper last weekend.
The former New Yorker told The Post he’d looked at “hundreds” of plans for a new Penn Station, and said he would prefer a plan that built a grand entrance of Eighth Avenue — effectively endorsing the Halmar/ASTM plan without actually naming it.
Is Trump going to name the station after himself?
Well, the president, no stranger to plastering his name on things, and his allies keep bringing it up.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy teased the possibility last summer when a reporter asked if a new Penn Station would get a new name.
“I imagine you’re asking, ‘is this going to be Trump Station?’”
Duffy replied.
“I think that has a nice ring to it.”
Later, amid negotiations to end his funding interference on the Hudson River Tunnel project — which is meant to increase rail capacity between New Jersey and Penn Station — Trump told Senator Chuck Schumer that he’d restore the funding if Penn Station and Dulles Airport were renamed for the President.
Funding was later restored by court order.
And as recently as last weekend, Trump told the Post that the “Trump Station” moniker was not his idea — but had been recently proposed by MSG’s owner James Dolan and property developer Steven Roth during a meeting to dissuade him from approving any plan that would demolish The Garden.
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