Ross reveals dream plan for MSG site.

Stephen Ross often refers to the Time Warner Center as a Swiss watch because of the complexity involved in packing the building's retail, office, hotel, restaurant, entertainment, and residential components under one roof and in a complementary fashion.

By all accounts, the multibillion-dollar mixed-use development that Ross's firm, the Related Companies, completed in 2003 required an especially time consuming level of coordination and planning.

That project, of course, will not be as sweeping or complex as the makeover Ross is planning for the city's busiest and some say, most important, transportation hub. Last summer, when the Related Companies, in partnership with Vornado, was selected by the Empire State Development Corporation to build Moynihan Station in the Farley Post Office, Ross envisioned a far more grandiose plan to revitalize not only the Farley building but also Penn Station.

While pictures of the project have already been leaked, Ross offered attendees of a Real Estate Lenders Association breakfast last week a peek at previously unseen renderings that provide the most compelling glimpse yet of the developers' ambitious plans.

The computer generated images show a massive hall clad in glass and steel latticework positioned where Madison Square Garden is currently located and looking out upon 8th Avenue with Moynihan Station just across the street.

Its construction clearly depends on the planned relocation of MSG to the western annex of the Farley building, a move that Ross said he has begun to formalize with a letter of intent already signed by MSG's owners, the Dolan family.

The hall's design clearly pays homage to the Penn Station of old, which also employed glass panes supported by skeletal steel beams to dazzling effect. With its bountiful light and air, it is the type of iconic portal fitting for one of the city's busiest gateways and does much to ameliorate the glaring deficiencies of a station long reviled for its claustrophobic collection of dreary subterranean corridors.

In the drawings, the station will be flanked on both sides by a major office tower that will occupy the 8th Avenue corners on 33rd Street and 31st Street and the glass hall will be ringed with multistory retail space. The prevalent use of glass, open space and a vertical mall concept gives the hall, which Ross said was still in a preliminary phase of design, an unmistakable resemblance to the base of the Time Warner Center, though on a larger scale.

"People asked me what I'm going to do after Time Warner Center and I think that I found it," Ross said.

Overall, the plan would install at least 5.5 million s/f--and possibly as much as 7 million s/f--of mixed-use development on the current MSG site while restoring some of the elegance of the old Penn Station, whose callous demolition is considered one of the city's greatest architectural blunders.

"We would build a new Penn Station, which is the most important thing that could happen for New York," Ross said. "It's the most heavily trafficked station in the United States and it's probably also the worst train station."

"We're going to take the manhole cover off of it," Ross said, alluding to the removal of MSG's hulking cylindrical arena.

But the developers' overarching plans, as good as they are for Penn Station, have had the perhaps unintended consequence of becoming a major impediment in the state approval process for the current Moynihan Station plan, which includes only the development of a train station and commercial space in the eastern annex of the Farley building.

In recent weeks, state officials, most notably Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, have said they would need to see the overarching plan be fore they could approve work to begin on Moynihan Station, an expansion of Penn Station that the ESDC considers essential to accommodating the city's growing number of commuters.

Although an August letter from the State Comptroller Alan Hevesi indicates that state officials may consider that greater plan to consist only of the Moynihan Station project and the MSG swap, there has been strong evidence to suggest that the redevelopment of Penn Station would also have to be included.

Hevesi and Silver have stated that a much of their opposition to the current plan is its omission of the full financial implications of the larger plan. Understanding simply the finances of an MSG move alone may not be enough. Implicit in that move is the redevelopment of its existing site, construction that may require state and federal funds. Ross confirmed this fact, stating last week that work on Penn Station would rely at least in part on public money.

It is this very kind of potential financial exposure to the state that Hevesi and Silver have sought to quantify before approving any form of project plan.

Given the difficulty of formalizing that overarching project, whose complexity exceeds the Time Warner Center and is in many respects still in the planning phase, the presentation of a plan that includes the development of Moynihan Station, the relocation of MSG and the development of the current MSG site may be months or even years away--a time flame that could mean significant delays for Moynihan Station.

Sensing that their more modest station proposal was in danger of being overshadowed by the other development, ESDC officials pledged in recent months that approval of Moynihan Station would not preclude the eventual installation of MSG in the Farley building or the Penn Station renovation. ESDC chairman Charles Gargano went so far as to call the ESDC's current plan "phase 1" of a greater project whose "phase 2" could be the MSG move.

But Silver has rejected Gargano's phased approach, reinforcing further that the overarching plan would have to be presented before any its various projects could be approved, a discouraging sign for Moynihan Station, which is expected to come before the Public Authorities Control Board today to seek approval for certain portions of its financing.

"The whole concept of the PACB is to determine the state's vulnerability," said Silver, who is one of the board's three voting members. "And this is not the financing plan for the ultimate plan they admit, and ultimately, it is not what the board is designed to do. Basically, I'm just saying that until those questions are answered, it's premature."

Silver's contention that the development of Moynihan Station cannot be considered merely a phase in a greater plan is widely expected to play out at today's PACB meeting in either a rejection or postponement of the project.

According to the ESDC and the developers, delays could endanger the roughly $116 million in federal funding the project has secured and which has already been the target of rescission efforts in the senate.

"There's jeopardy," Ross said. "I can't tell you the status of the federal funds."