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Political trends for 2010: Build Moynihan Station

Juliette Michaelson on January 4, 2010 |

New_York_Post_logo.pngThe best way for New York City to recover from the current economic slump? Build Moynihan Station!

In this New York Post op-ed, Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at Regional Plan Association, argues that City and State must join forces to see through a number of stalled development projects that will help the City get out of the current recession. The most important of these projects is Moynihan Station.

To access the story, click here (and scroll down). Full text on the jump.


POLITICAL TRENDS FOR 2010

DEVELOPMENT BACK ON TRACK?

Some parts of New York feel like they're in a deep, post-apocalyptic funk -- vacant storefronts, pot-holed streets, broken sidewalks, stalled construction sites, garbage-strewn blocks, untended graffiti. Our boom-and-bust city has pulled out of worse before and surely can do so again. But we need government to push hard on its end -- supplying infrastructure in now-fallow neighborhoods and moving forward important projects that have been mired in bureaucracy and strife.

Of these the most important to the city's future is Moynihan Station, the ambitious attempt to convert the old Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue, across from Madison Square Garden, into a glorious new Penn Station. Seemingly moribund since the winter of 2008, Moynihan is back on track now, in part because Amtrak's new chief, former state transportation commissioner Joseph Boardman, agreed to relocate his agency to the new train hall so long as Amtrak could share in future retail revenues. That deal was just struck in December, so that Amtrak is now at last onboard.

In a neighboring but unrelated move, the City Council approved the West Side rail yards rezoning, which will allow the mixed-use development of 13 yards, directly south of Moynihan Station, with commercial and apartment buildings. The redevelopment of the long-fallow, rail-yard-dominated West Side will start in 2010.

Across the East River in Long Island City, Queens, the Economic Development Corporation will begin on-site infrastructure for the Hunters Point South development, which will build 5,000 housing units on 30 acres of prime waterfront. The site is magnificent, but like most of the city's old industrial sites, is bereft of the basics -- sewage, roads, parks. To judge just how quickly and effectively good parks can transform an area, New Yorkers can look to the Brooklyn Bridge Park that, after much contention, will open in 2010.

- Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Regional Plan Association