City Planning Commission
'The Garden has to go' to make Penn Station great, but it won't go quietly
There are many obstacles standing in the way of transforming the famously depressing Penn Station into something more befitting of the nation's busiest transit hub, and one of those obstacles is Madison Square Garden. More
(1)On making 'green' building in New York City a less terrible experience
Say you own an apartment building in New York City and would like to make it more energy-efficient.
One way to do this, in theory, would be to add insulation to the outside walls, which generally adds about four inches. But that would violate the zoning law that regulates floor-area ratio, which determines the maximum floor area allowed on the size of the lot. More
To fight Vornado behemoth, Empire State owners deploy sentiment
At a City Council hearing yesterday on a proposal for the site of the Hotel Pennsylvania, David Greenbaum, president of the New York office of Vornado Realty Trust, argued that New York City, “like great cities around the world," has “a skyline that changes." Peter Malkin, the chairman of Malkin Securities, the company that owns the Empire State Building, said in his testimony, "The city's skyline has only seen a handful of changes in 80 years since the Empire State Building was constructed." More
