Madison Square Garden - 4 Penn Plaza - by Charles Luckman Associates

[elfgam]

If the garden moves to the west side of Farley then it will rectify the single biggest problem of the proposed penn station which is that 75% of the commuters will continue to use the 7th Avenue entrance, since this is where most of the subways (B, D, F, V, N, R, Q, W, 1, 9) all drop them off and since most mid-town jobs are currently east of the station. By removing the garden (and one can only hope the monstrous tower that sit on it will either be removed as well, or at least re-skinned) there will be an opportunity to really make the entry space into the station on 8th Avenue a truly great space as well, and it will also make it easier for them (though they won't take advantage of this) to add more tracks, platforms and possibly the some of the three Penn Station extension tunnels being planned: the a new Hudson river tube, a new queens tube, and a new GC/Penn station connection, since this construction site will be an enourmous hole in the ground.

This might almost make the new penn station in Farley moot until the west side develops: who in their right mind would walk the extra distance to the middle block between 8th and 9th, when there is a 7th avenue entrance and (hopefully) a beautiful new 8th avenue concourse?

Ironically though, if the Garden is built there it would also block a lot of the development over in that area, just as it accused the Jets Stadium of doing. Essentially the garden would become the "back" of Penn Station... and who wants to be located at the back of something, next to a tunnel entrance, on an abandoned avenue? Not a great real estate selling point.

So the garden wrecks the old penn station, wrecks the neighborhood (ever notice how seedy that area of 34th street is, and how activity on 34th dies as soon as it passes 8th?), wrecks the west side expansion plans, wrecks the new penn station, and then finally wrecks the new west-side expansion plans... what a poison pill!

This whole thing also proves that the entire "opposition" to the stadium was BS... how's that for NIMBY?

[TLOZ Link5]

Maybe Futurama had the right idea with "Madison Cube Garden."

[tmg]

Originally Posted by krulltime

Why don't they just move somewhere like in Queens!

Perhaps it could move to the site of the old Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City: http://www.murphsplace.com/crowe/bra...2/msgbowl2.jpg

[lofter1]

Originally Posted by tmg

Perhaps it could move to the site of the old Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City: http://www.murphsplace.com/crowe/bra...2/msgbowl2.jpg

Do you know the exact location where this was?

[Comelade]

hello.
I have just read in a French newspaper, that "Madison square garden" was still going to be to delocalize with some streets.
have news?
files?

thank you

[londonlawyer]

Hi.

It's interesting that a French paper would report about MSG. What paper is it and in what city is it printed?

Madison Square Garden is possibly moving to a new location west of the Farley Post Office which is between 8th and 9th Avenues.

[ablarc]

Here's a discussion of this: http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/sh...t=3579&page=30

[jp1]

http://www.boxrec.com/media/index.ph...land_City_Bowl

Madison Square Garden Bowl

• South side of Northern Boulevard at 45th Street, Long Island City, Queens
• Also known as the “Long Island City Bowl"
• Nick-named “The Graveyard of Champions" because no reigning champion ever successfully defended his title here
• Capacity: 72,000
• Opened in 1932, but by 1939 it was rarely used as a boxing venue
• Site of four heavyweight title contests between 1932-35, including the June 21, 1932 Max Schmeling-Jack Sharkey bout

http://www.boxrec.com/media/index.ph..._Square_Garden

Madison Square Garden

There were four versions of Madison Square Garden:

• 1) 51 Madison Avenue––from 26th to 27th Street between Madison Avenue & Park Avenue South (Fourth Avenue), site of the first two Madison Square Garden venues. The first existing from 1879 to 1890.
• 2) The second, perhaps the most memorable of them all, lasted from 1890 to 1925

The former Harlem Railroad Depot showing its new name



The original Madison Square Garden

Third Madison Square Garden

• 3) 825 Eighth Avenue--on the west side of Eighth Avenue between 49th & 50th Street. Existed from 1925 through 1967.
• 4) 33rd Street between Seventh & Eighth Avenues, above Pennsylvania Station--site of the present Madison Square Garden.

[ablarc]

The second one was the best. Stanford White was the architect. He was having dinner in it when Harry Thaw walked up to him and put a bullet in his head.

[Swede]

Originally Posted by TLOZ Link5

Maybe Futurama had the right idea with "Madison Cube Garden."

Which, iirc, was right on the banks of the Hudson, just like the canceled Jets stadium.

[lofter1]

Is Old Penn Station's Killer Significant?
Or Unforgivable?

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
October 16, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/re...te/16scap.html



Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

A BUILDING WE LOVE TO HATE? It is included in a list of significant modern
buildings because of how its urban-planning changes affected the city.
But one critic calls it "unforgivable by any standard

Is Old Penn Station's Killer Significant? Or Unforgivable?

ARE you exhausted by the drawn-out battle to preserve the architect Edward Durell Stone's 1965 art museum at Columbus Circle? Well, if you couldn't get your head around landmark protection for that Venetian-marble fantasy, you may gulp at the next threatened work of mid-20th-century architecture to be considered important.

Included in a list of significant modern buildings in Manhattan by three leading preservation organizations, including the local chapter of the modern architecture group Docomomo U.S., is one that may make you wince: the 1968 Madison Square Garden, which infamously wiped out the original Pennsylvania Station.

By the late 1950's, the old Penn Station, designed by McKim, Mead & White at Seventh Avenue south of 34th Street, was dying. It was a half-century-old monument to rail travel gasping for breath in a new atmosphere of airplane fuel and automobile gasoline.

A development group led by Irving Felt floated plans for a vast, futuristic arena with a swooping, saddle-shaped roof and two Guggenheim Museum-like swirls on one end. It had the goofy grandeur of a Martian spaceport from Popular Science magazine. The project was designed by Charles Luckman, who had trained as an architect but became president of Lever Brothers and was in large part responsible for commissioning the firm's sleek 1952 headquarters, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, at 52nd Street and Park Avenue.

The arena project found a landing place on the site of Penn Station. The possible demise of the station's brooding grandeur for what was to become the new Madison Square Garden provoked a storm of controversy. But the preservationist Harmon Goldstone, later the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, wrote optimistically: "Is the proposed new building, for its own purpose in its own idiom, going to be as inspiring a design as McKim, Mead & White's? There is no reason why it cannot be."

Luckman, who had returned to architecture, reduced his design to a drum-shaped 20,000-seat arena, with a facade of precast concrete panels. To avoid interior columns, the structural engineers Severud-Perrone-Fischer-Sturm-Conlin-Bandel designed a 400-foot-wide roof supported by cables, in the manner of the Roman Colosseum, which had a fabric roof.

Perhaps not expecting much, contemporary critics said little about the resulting Madison Square Garden. In 1967, Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic of The New York Times, briefly called it "neither avant-garde nor high architectural art." The magazine Progressive Architecture noted that, based on the rate of replacement of prior Madison Square Gardens - this was its fourth incarnation, taking over for one at 49th Street and Eighth Avenue - "the present one should come down about the year 2000."

But later writers did not hesitate to weigh in. Among them was Paul Goldberger, the successor to Ms. Huxtable as architecture critic for The Times. In his book "The City Observed: New York" (Random House, 1979) he called it "a graceless, sloppy, cheap entertainment and office complex that would be an insult to an empty site in the middle of nowhere."
"For this," he said, "there is no excuse."

And Richard David Story, in New York magazine in 1987, listed it in the top 10 of "The Buildings New Yorkers Love to Hate," along with the World Trade Center and the Edward Durell Stone building.

The site of Luckman's Madison Square Garden has been considered for redevelopment since the 1990's. Now its owner, Madison Square Garden Inc., is negotiating to build a new Garden nearby and to replace its 1968 building with a mixed-use complex. The new Garden would be just west of the current one, on Eighth Avenue, at the west end of the General Post Office building.
But architectural history is catching up with many iconic demons of 1960's architecture. Preservation organizations like Landmark West! are still fighting for landmark status for the Columbus Circle structure. Last year, the old Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building), north of Grand Central Terminal, was the subject of a monograph, "The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream" (MIT Press, 2004), by Meredith Clausen, a professor of architectural history at the University of Washington, Seattle.

It was also last year that the "Manhattan Modern Map" was co-published by three groups: the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, at Columbia University; the World Monuments Fund; and the New York/Tristate chapter of Docomomo U.S., which is devoted to preserving modern architecture. A stimulating, provocative document, the map is available for $7 at www.urbancenterbooks.org.

The map includes more than 150 modern buildings built before 1980, noting that "the majority, recognized by local and national preservation organizations as significant, have not yet been singled out for protection in a formal designation process."

The list includes official landmarks, like the Guggenheim Museum, Lever House and the Whitney Museum. But it also lists lesser-known structures, like the Spartan-seeming Stuyvesant Town housing complex, from 14th to 20th Street between First Avenue and Avenue C, and the funky, pink brick United Parcel Service building at 43rd Street from 11th to 12th Avenue. It also lists Madison Square Garden.

The times in historic preservation have been a-changing since the landmarks law was passed in 1965, but to single out the successor to Penn Station plucks a sacrilegious chord.

"This building remains unforgivable by any standard," Mr. Goldberger, now dean of the Parsons School of Design, wrote in an e-mail message. Diana Goldstein, who was among those who sparked the original protests and picket lines around Penn Station in 1962, wrote in an e-mail, "Who on earth thinks that building is worth preserving?"

Nina Rappaport, co-chairwoman of Docomomo's local chapter, qualified the map's language. She wrote in an e-mail that "the reasoning was more for the building's urban-planning changes and how that affected the city, not for its architectural beauty."

But a decade or two ago, the idea of landmark designation for the Edward Durell Stone building would have been greeted by many with hoots - and now it is a preservation cause célèbre in New York, with another round of lawsuits under way.

Diane Jackier, a spokeswoman for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said by e-mail that the commission has "not made any determination" about the Garden, a statement that may cause old-line preservationists to cringe. But the case for landmark designation is, on the face of it, rather strong: it is a unique building, designed by an important architect, with unusual engineering and a complex history.

Kate Wood, executive director of Landmark West!, said in an e-mail that the group has to mull the building's significance but that "I'm all for a public hearing for Madison Square Garden."

"It would tell us a lot about where we are in our ability to evaluate the architectural and historical significance of the recent past," she said. "The Landmarks Preservation Commission needs to embrace, not shy away from, this kind of discussion."



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

[ablarc]

Are you exhausted by the drawn-out battle to preserve the architect Edward Durell Stone's 1965 art museum at Columbus Circle? Well, if you couldn't get your head around landmark protection for that Venetian-marble fantasy, you may gulp at the next threatened work of mid-20th-century architecture to be considered important.

Included in a list of significant modern buildings by three leading preservation organizations, including the local chapter of the modern architecture group Docomomo U.S., is one that may make you wince: the 1968 Madison Square Garden, which infamously wiped out the original Pennsylvania Station.

Everything depends on who's doing the designating. The only group whose opinion carries legal weight has refused to consider 2 Columbus Circle, a building with genuine merit. If they designate Madison Square Garden (that #*@$% piece of crap!), it'll be a travesty. Are they worse than useless?

Madison Square Garden and 2 Columbus Circle: when it comes to urban architecture, there's all the difference in the world between the two. One recognized its context when the dogma said "treat every building as a free-floating object in space." The other is a free-floating object in space.

[lofter1]

LPC will probably grant a hearing for MSG just so they can say "See, we're fair".

[TLOZ Link5]

If they try to designate MSG, I might just steal a wrecking ball and knock it down myself.

[TLOZ Link5]

Originally Posted by Swede

Which, iirc, was right on the banks of the Hudson, just like the canceled Jets stadium.

Heh, yeah. And they held the 3004 Olympics there also. And the 2980 Olympics, too.