New Jersey Transit To Be Anchor Rail Tenant of Proposed Station
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The transformation of the Farley Post Office into a rail hub moved a step closer to reality yesterday when New Jersey Transit announced it will be the anchor rail tenant of the proposed Moynihan Station on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets.
“The creation of Moynihan Station, with NJ Transit as its main tenant, will ease commuter congestion, open up Midtown, and create jobs for New Yorkers,” Senator Schumer wrote in an announcement he released with Senator Clinton yesterday.
NJ Transit is expected to pay $2.3 million a year to lease 35,000 square feet of space, which it will use to extend four tracks from the adjacent Penn Station. The intent of the agreement is for NJ Transit to exercise operation control of the station, which should be operational by 2010, according to a statement released yesterday.
The memorandum of understanding executed yesterday between NJ Transit and the Moynihan Station Development Corporation paves the way for the two organizations to negotiate a 99-year lease, which officials expect to be signed by this summer.
Moynihan Station, expected to cost $818 million, would expand the James A. Farley Post Office to include 300,000 square feet of space for the train station, 850,000 square feet of re tail space, and 250,000 square feet for the post office, which will pay a nominal rent of $1 a year.
Plans to build the station were first proposed in the early 1990s, though funding debates in Congress, Amtrak’s decision not to leave Penn Station, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have delayed its construction.
Last July, the Empire State Develop ment Corporation selected two developers, Vorando Realty Trust and the Related Companies, to collaborate in the station’s construction, in part because their proposal left the land marked Farley building, designed by the celebrated turn-of-the-century firm McKim, Mead and White, basically intact, according to the chairman of both development corporations, Charles Gargano.
McKim, Mead and White also designed the original Penn Station, which was demolished in 1963, an event that many consider the catalyst for the landmarks preservation movement.
No less a figure than the Dalai Lama threw his support behind the station during his visit to New York in September, mostly because of his long friendship with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator after whom the station is named.
