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March 9, 2009
Smith: How Bloomberg Could Finally Build Moynihan Station
NY Magazine, "Daily Intel"
By Chris Smith
The state sponsor of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards megaproject gets dissed by an unnamed government official in an article about efforts to get the Moynihan Station project back on track (emphasis added):
It would be wildly premature to hire another stonecutter, but there is new hope that Moynihan Station will get underway. Senator Chuck Schumer, with the help of the recession, has reframed the project along its original lines: Creating a new transportation hub instead of redeveloping a vast stretch of Midtown West all at once by moving Madison Square Garden to Ninth Avenue, as private developers Vornado and Related Companies intended to do when they won bidding rights four years ago. “Vornado and Related can’t get financing for the larger project right now, and they don’t know where they’re putting the buildings,” a government official says. “Dealing with trying to move Madison Square Garden is an intractable mess, and ESDC [New York State’s development agency] is not capable of running such a project. So this simplifies things by putting the Port Authority in charge and making transportation the central part of the project again.”
NoLandGrab: We can't speak for the competency of the ESDC, however it is commonly believed that it was chosen so the Atlantic Yards project would be scrutinized under a less stringent land-use review process and, by law, the State could supercede all local zoning restrictions.
Posted by lumi at March 9, 2009 5:33 AM