Penn Station Overhaul May Finally Be Within Reach. But Trump’s Influence Is Making Dems Uneasy.

NEW YORK – During a recent meeting with the team President Donald Trump picked to remake Penn Station, the powerful head of New York’s Senate Finance Committee started to think about “Say Yes To The Dress."

A cardinal rule on the reality TV show – about a Manhattan bridal shop – is to never allow a bride to try on a dress she can’t afford.

In the meeting, Sen. Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat, felt she was being asked to support one of the largest public works projects in the country without knowing how much it would cost or who would pay for it.

“I just want to know what kind of dress they are trying to sell me,” Krueger said. “And I want to know if it's completely unrealistic for the budget of government."

Democrats from New York City Hall to Capitol Hill share her concerns and are getting cold feet as Trump tries to overhaul the transit hub that moves a half million people each day through the heart of Manhattan.

For 60 years, since the original Penn Station was torn down, plans to replace it with something grand have collapsed amid infighting and cost concerns. Now, Trump is backing a six-year, $8 billion (or so) plan to make Penn Station “historic again.” And the president wants shovels in the ground by the end of next year.

Renderings and scale models show a sweeping design meant to shape the city’s identity and evoke other architectural masterpieces like Berlin’s neoclassical Altes Museum and New York’s own Grand Central Terminal.

But even as Trump pushes a plan that looks great on paper, Democrats are deeply skeptical, suspecting there’s a catch and that New Yorkers will be on the hook. Another big concern is that Trump may be looking to name the station after himself.

“It's appropriate that it is a federal project and one that should be paid for by the U.S. government,” said Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal. “It's a shame that we have a president who can't be trusted.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler, who has fought Trump since his years as a local real estate developer, was even more blunt, calling the president’s intervention “a hostile takeover of Penn Station.”

For years, New York officials had been working on their own ideas for the train hall. Grand overhauls have been stymied, but parts of the station have gotten a makeover.

The Trump administration’s view is that Democrats are kicking themselves over all the progress that a Republican administration is making after decades of false starts.

“Their Trump Derangement Syndrome is so severe that instead of celebrating key milestones hit at record speeds, they are complaining about a successful plan they previously supported and raising concerns with an engineering process they themselves previously touted,” Department of Transportation spokesperson Danna Almeida said in an email.

Some Democrats who tangle with Trump say they hope he can pull it off.

Notably, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul supports the president’s plan — as long as the federal government foots the bill.

She publicly cheered Trump’s decision last year to put Amtrak in charge of the project, even if that meant ripping it away from the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which has its own ideas that conflict with his vision. She also praised the man Trump put in charge of the project at Amtrak, Andy Byford, who was affectionately known as “Train Daddy” in his former job leading the New York subway system.

Yet, the project remains an easy target for Democrats due to Trump's involvement.

In recent weeks, the fight over who pays has been obscured by a sparring match over what to call the station. Trump officials have previously made it known he’d like his name on it.

Then Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Congress he’d like to rename it, setting off a brawl with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who vowed to kill any renaming for the president.

Democratic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, one of the few local officials who has not sat down with the developers to talk about Penn Station, has said very little about the project. He’s been cautious but clearly wants no part of the Schumer-Duffy mishegas.

“I am more interested in what the station would be able to deliver to New Yorkers than what we call that station,” Mamdani told reporters in late July.

Since the original Penn Station, with its imposing columns and soaring marble archways, was demolished in 1963, there hasn’t been a building at the midtown transit hub that lives up to the name.

Instead, the area known as Penn Station is a disorienting cavern owned by Amtrak and buried beneath Madison Square Garden. Three different railroads and the city subway system converge there, making it the busiest transit hub in the nation. But they are connected through a series of hallways, concourses and stairways that would give M.C. Escher vertigo.

To rationalize the space, the Trump administration this year picked Halmar and Skanska to be the master developers and work with Amtrak on an overhaul of a whole city block. They’d build a new train hall around and under Madison Square Garden with bright, grand entrances meant to allow commuters to pleasantly come and go or even hang out.

A few years before Trump’s reelection, the same developers — also known as ASTM, Halmar’s parent company — had rounded up support from local civic groups and some key Democrats for basically the same vision. The MTA, however, was never on board and worried private developers were looking to take commuters and taxpayers for a ride.

But some Democrats seemed open to the company’s ideas, provided they and Halmar could hammer out the right deal.

Then Trump won reelection, took over the project and scrambled those alliances.

Now, whatever deal is struck will be between Halmar and Trump officials, and many New York Democrats say they have been cut out of the process and don’t trust the president.

Assemblymember Tony Simone, who represents the area, said he and his colleagues can’t take Trump — who he called a “corrupt developer now as a corrupt president” — at his word.

“All New Yorkers know this guy, so that's why I think we have this apprehension,” he said.

Still, Simone said if Trump got Congress to pay for the project, he’d give him credit.

Part of the problem is the plan’s big unknowns: It’s not clear how much it will cost. It’s not clear how much the federal government will pay or how much New York taxpayers and commuters will pay.

The plan also requires cutting a check to Madison Square Garden owner Jim Dolan, a Republican ally of Trump and major donor to Bruce Blakeman, Hochul’s GOP gubernatorial challenger. To achieve the soaring ceilings, developers need to remove a theater from inside the Garden, an incision that isn’t expected to affect the court where the New York Knicks play. It’s also not clear how big that check will be.

Dolan’s company, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, has praised Trump’s selection of developers and in June filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was contemplating the sale of the theater to the developers, known formally as Penn Transformation Partners.

Project supporters have portrayed criticism about the lack of clarity as wildly unfair.

People close to the project argue the process they’re involved in is multi-step and they’re not at the stage yet where they have finished designing the station so they can’t say what it will cost. Trump administration officials pointed to similar progressive engineering projects that Democrats have supported in the past.

"We don't have all the answers yet, but we're upfront about that," Byford said in an interview.

The development team is also in the midst of a major outreach effort. It holds regular meetings with Democrats on Manhattan’s West Side — it was during one of these updates that Krueger busted out her wedding dress comparison — and it’s met Hochul and senior aides to Mamdani. In a presentation to reporters in June, Byford said he’d had a “very positive” in-person meeting with Hochul and described her as “very interested” and “fully supportive of the concept.”

When it comes to paying to make the models a reality, the developers and Amtrak appear to be counting on federal largesse. Trump wants shovels in the ground by the end of next year. In the past, high-dollar, priority projects — like a bridge Sen. Mitch McConnell championed in Kentucky or the Hudson River train tunnels that Schumer and President Joe Biden backed — have received federal grants that cover the lion’s share of project costs.

For Penn Station, that could be as much as 80 percent, with the rest of the money coming from some combination of low-interest federal loans or private financing.

The problem is that some Democrats are drawing a strict red line: the federal government has to pay for the whole project.

“I think the understanding from the state and the city is that if the federal government is taking over and leading this project, then the federal government needs to pay for it,” said City Council Member Carl Wilson, one of the elected officials who represents the area.

Hochul set the tone for this approach. As soon as Trump put Amtrak in charge of the project, she spent money that the state had been setting aside for Penn on other things, a very public move meant to wash her hands of the project’s cost.

In New Jersey, which also relies on the transit hub, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill also wants to make sure the federal government “puts real dollars into a better Penn Station,” said spokesperson Stephen Sigmund.

But some New York Democrats appear to be acting under the assumption that Hochul extracted an explicit pledge from Trump.

“That’s where the governor got that idea, that’s what he said to her, and he said it more than once,” Krueger said.

Simone expressed a similar sentiment: “He literally said, 'I will get this done, and we will pay for it.’”

While the governor has repeatedly implied the White House promised to pay for the redo, Trump has not said this publicly.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Hochul spokesperson Sean Butler said the governor secured a “full federal commitment to finance and execute this project.”

“Last year,” Hochul said in May, “I took my case directly to the White House to cut through red tape and secure full federal funding for delivery of this project, saving New York taxpayers over $1 billion and accelerating this long overdue transformation.”

Peter Cipriano, who worked in the Department of Transportation during Trump’s first term, is leading the development team at Halmar, which went public with the meat of its plans in 2023.

“Now, thanks to the federal government's unprecedented support, we finally have a chance to make this plan a reality,” he said in a statement. “Working together as one team for the public good, we can deliver a station worthy of America's greatest city.”