A Short Renewal for the Garden

Monday afternoon, a City Council committee votes on how long to extend Madison Square Garden’s “special permit” to keep operating at its decades-long site above Penn Station; here’s why that extension should be short.

The MTA, NJ Transit and Amtrak this month raised new alarms about dangers of evacuating the Garden and the station in a major emergency: They demand changes that could cost MSG’s owners hundreds of millions. The MTA has threatened to evict MSG “if necessary.”

But the Dolan family, who control the Garden, are fighters: Expect a legal battle for the ages if the MTA goes down that road. Plus, New Yorkers certainly don’t want to just lose Manhattan’s only major concert venue and sports arena: The threat of moving the Knicks out of town won the Dolans a lucrative tax exemption on the Garden.

Nor should the public spend big on building a new MSG, as some “Move the Garden” dreamers seem to assume. Heck, the proposal for the MTA to buy the Hulu Theater under MSG to build to a useless new Penn “grand entrance” would be a stupider use of taxpayer funds than even the white-elephant “Oculus” downtown.

All this, as the multibillion-dollar deal Gov. Hochul inherited from Andrew Cuomo to remake the whole Penn area is totally dead. That (and the temporary-we-hope woes of the city’s commercial-real-estate market) has left developers sitting on prime real estate in the area with no good use for it.

One more wild card: Mayor Adams is finally pushing to rezone the Garment District, whose woefully underused “manufacturing” areas could be prime residential ones.

With so many issues confronting the huge swath from Chelsea through Penn and into Herald Square, it’s the wrong time for an extension even as long as 10 years. A three- or four-year one, stipulating that the Dolans at least settle the evacuation issue, seems wisest.

This is also an opportunity for Adams or Hochul to show leadership with some grand bargain that satisfies all the stakeholders — perhaps the (just-updated) vision from the Grand Penn Community Alliance, which sees a more-lucrative new MSG like the Dolans’ Vegas Sphere between Herald Square and a much-improved Penn.

Everyone will likely have to settle for far less, but a short permit renewal that leaves all options open is the best hope to move beyond the bickering.