Not all Manhattan activists hate everything the Trump administration is doing.
The administration’s takeover of Penn Station’s planned overhaul has provided some comfort to defenders of the city block marked for death at the southern end of the transit hub.
Their pleas to the Cuomo, Hochul and Adams administrations have always fallen on deaf ears, but, allegedly, the Trump administration has been receptive.
This is according to one outspoken critic of demolishing Block 780, a $1 billion assortment of buildings bordered by West 30th and West 31st streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues. He reports encouraging signs from Trump’s Federal Railroad Administration.
“I am going to give the new FRA effort a chance,” wrote Eugene Sinigalliano in an op-ed. “My modest interactions with them have been constructive and their own guidelines favor through-running.”
He means running commuter trains through Penn Station rather than having them park and turn around, as they do now. The need for more train parking is the reason Block 780 would be razed at some point after the Gateway tunnels are built. Through-running would allow that block of commercial and residential buildings to remain.
Sinigalliano submitted a statement to FRA officials and found them to be responsive. “I am optimistic that the FRA understands how important it is to fully explore whether through-running via an adaptive reuse at Penn Station is the ‘faster, better and cheaper’ alternative that would leave my neighborhood intact,” he wrote.
Sinigalliano is not just a guy off the street. He’s on the state’s Penn advisory committee and wears a bunch of other hats, including owner of Ultra Sound Studio at 251 West 30th Street. He has been at the business for 45 years.
He is also president of the residential tenants association at the building, which was purchased for $50 million in 2016 by an LLC controlled by Michael Reid and Gerard Nocera. They co-founded Herald Square Properties and now run its successor, HSP Real Estate Group.
Sinigalliano told a state Senate committee in 2022 that Reid and Nocera were spending millions of dollars to modernize 251 West 30th.
He is trying to create a narrative that lots of money has been invested in the block, which (along with preserving housing) makes it worth saving. That’s also why he calls it “my neighborhood” instead of the impersonal term Block 780.
Another storyline that emerges from his op-ed is that not all critics of New York’s Penn District plan are on the same page.
“Architect Alexandros Washburn and the Grand Penn Community Alliance have for years been sympathetic to through-running and developing to the north and leaving Block 780 alone,” he wrote. “I am beyond disappointed to see their recent renderings, which show the neighborhood and residential buildings to the south of Penn Station demolished. I don’t know what is motivating that.”
He also blasted the Regional Plan Association and Municipal Art Society, saying their “positions are all over the map and show little, if any, genuine regard for the neighborhood.”
Those two nonprofits have a regional and citywide perspective — and, in his words, have advocated for the block’s displacement — in contrast to Sinigalliano’s singular focus on saving his rather unglamorous block, so his disagreement with them is hardly a surprise.
As for President Donald Trump, he is not known as a preservationist and Sinigalliano is not likely on his holiday card list. But Trump has been cutting federal spending and probably prefers something less ambitious than the Cuomo-era plan for a new terminal on Block 780.
If Trump can set the Penn project on a path that obviates the need for a new underground rail yard, Sinigalliano’s dream may come true.