New York

Why Is It So Hard to Fix Penn Station?

Published

3 weeks ago

November 13, 2025

In 1999, President Bill Clinton stood across the street from New York’s Pennsylvania Station with the state’s governor and its senior senator to announce plans for transforming the area into a modern gateway for the nation’s biggest city.

Presidents do not often appear at news conferences about train stations. But Penn Station, in Midtown Manhattan, was the busiest transportation hub in North America, and Mr. Clinton had made public transit a priority. He and Gov. George E. Pataki posed beside a miniature model of a grand new train hall, while Senator Daniel P. Moynihan extolled its future grandeur.

“Penn Station is the start,” Mr. Moynihan said, “and we will find — when we complete this project — that suddenly all will seem possible.”

More than 25 years, five presidencies and four governors later, the plan to rebuild Penn Station is nowhere near completion.

For the 600,000 people who pass through every day, Penn Station is indispensable. It remains the busiest transit hub in the United States, with nearly double the number of daily passengers as the busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International. Much of the Eastern Seaboard might grind to a halt without it.

It is also widely abhorred. Passengers descend into a gloomy, dimly lit warren of overcrowded concourses, much of it layered in grime and corroded by decay, sitting above an array of subterranean tracks whose age creates regular snarls and delays that cost New York millions of dollars in lost productivity each day.

More broadly, it is a stagnant symbol of something deeper in America, a condition that afflicts so many attempts to get big things done: inertia. Again and again, when America undertakes big projects, politics and government get in the way.

The owners of Madison Square Garden, the arena that sits on top of Penn Station, have rejected proposals to move it.

Countless ideas for making Penn Station grander and more commuter-friendly have been floated and shelved over the decades. The conversion of the James A. Farley Building across Eighth Avenue into Moynihan Hall for passengers was an exception, if one that ran wildly over budget and beyond schedule. But Moynihan, named for the senator, is mostly ornamental. With each attempt to restart work on the larger underground station, progress has been torpedoed by a political rivalry or a powerful billionaire or infighting among transit agencies with their own priorities.

As yardsticks of American progress go, Penn Station does not inspire pride. Since Mr. Clinton’s appearance there 26 years ago, China has constructed nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail tracks and built more than a thousand new stations.

There have been other bright spots, such as the renovation of LaGuardia Airport in New York. But that took more than eight years. Saudi Arabia built an entire transit system in Riyadh in a little over 10 years.

In the United States, the investment of billions of dollars in taxpayer money and the extraordinary undertaking of renovating century-old infrastructure are among the many reasons large projects stall before they even get off the ground.

But the failure often starts and stops with politics. Some critics blame multiple layers of federal, state and local regulations that deter investment. Some blame a progressive inclination to spread authority to community groups and individuals. Others point to extreme partisan politics as the root of the paralysis.

Penn Station has basically the same array of tracks and platforms as when it first opened in 1910.

“We’ve got a system that doesn’t have anyone who can actually make the decision,” said Marc J. Dunkelman, a research fellow at Brown University and the author of “Why Nothing Works.” The stasis at Penn Station is a “microcosm of why generally government doesn’t work,” he said.

Eliot Spitzer, a former Democratic governor of New York, said Penn Station was “a classic example” of how “fractured decision-making” leads to delays and conflicting priorities.

“When you have that many entities involved, it makes it nearly impossible to get a resolution,” he said.

Penn has long been a station divided, carved up into fiefs occupied and maintained by railroads whose managers constantly compete for authority and resources.

The station itself, sitting beneath Madison Square Garden, is owned and controlled by Amtrak, the national passenger railroad.

But its primary users are two state-run transit agencies: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the Long Island Rail Road in New York, and NJ Transit. Each has exclusive use of some tracks and platforms.

But they must share most of the tracks and platforms with Amtrak, which has the ultimate say over train movements in and out of the station.

The tension among those three agencies has been compounded by the intransigence of James L. Dolan, the billionaire whose company owns Madison Square Garden, which has squatted atop the station for more than 60 years. Their failure to collaborate on a solution has left Penn mired in a sorry state that has been lamented by a generation of everyday commuters.

In New York, a long line of strong-willed elected officials — Mr. Spitzer included — have pledged that a makeover of Penn Station was on the way.

In 2006, Mr. Pataki, the Republican governor, spoke of creating “a visionary new Pennsylvania Station.” His successor, Mr. Spitzer, said in 2008 that he was committed to a revamp of Penn that would “redefine Midtown Manhattan.” In 2016, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo likened the station to “seven levels of hell” and, rolling out his own $3 billion plan, vowed, “This will get done.”

Most recently, the current governor, Kathy Hochul, said that “New Yorkers do not deserve what they have been subjected to for decades at Penn Station” and presented a revised version of Mr. Cuomo’s proposal with an estimated cost of more than $6 billion.

After all of that talk about all of those visions, Penn Station remains a confusing, overburdened labyrinth of hallways and stairwells buried beneath a 20,000-seat entertainment venue.

Penn Station now serves more daily passengers than even the busiest airport in America.

Its century-old infrastructure takes frequent bites out of the metropolitan economy: Every hour of delay for commuters from Long Island or New Jersey costs the city’s employers nearly $20 million, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate from the Partnership for New York City, a business group.

Kathryn S. Wylde, chief executive of the partnership, said in 2017 that “Penn Station is a symbol of the failure of America to keep up with the escalating demands on urban public transportation.”

She reiterated that sentiment in September: “Nothing has changed.”

Community advocates agree. “We really do have a tragic level of institutional dysfunction with warring entities,” said Lynn Ellsworth, who in 2020 co-founded the Empire Station Coalition, which called for a redesign that would render Penn Station more efficient, more welcoming and easier to navigate.

The railroads that coexist within the station, Ms. Ellsworth said, “don’t have the managerial competence to rise above their parochial self-interests.”

Modern Structural Problems

Penn Station is a layer cake of inadequacy, with three levels that complicate all efforts to improve service for the thousands of people passing through every day.

New York officials have frequently likened a trip through Penn to a descent into hell. Andy Byford, the Amtrak executive recently put in charge of overhauling the station, described the platforms as a “dark, gloomy, boiling-hot, narrow and cramped situation.”

On the bottom, hundreds of daily trains are confined to essentially the same century-old 21-track layout built for smaller, less frequent trains. The time it takes to get trains in and out of the station is now a main cause of delays and slowdowns.

In the 1960s, when Penn Station was rebuilt with Madison Square Garden atop it, more than 1,000 columns were driven through the platforms, into the bedrock of Manhattan, to support the massive venue and an adjacent office tower.

In 2025, all those columns — plus staircases, escalators and elevators — force passengers to squeeze through narrow gaps that are sometimes only a few feet wide. Currently, there is not enough space on each platform to hold both arriving and departing riders.

As passengers ascend to the concourse, they are confronted with a low-ceilinged maze of subterranean corridors into which no natural light has ever shone.

Track assignments aren’t announced until the last minute to prevent collisions between departing and arriving passengers. So people clump together on the concourse levels — like in this cramped, poorly ventilated NJ Transit waiting area.

The biggest obstacle to a total overhaul of Penn Station is the arena that replaced the original station in the 1960s. Any rearrangement or expansion of the tracks and platforms on the bottom must first grapple with the forest of steel beams holding up the Garden.

Right now, Amtrak is focused on the construction of a new two-track rail tunnel under the Hudson River, a $16 billion project known as Gateway. (This fall, the Trump administration suspended federal funding for the project and threatened to terminate it in an apparent attempt to pressure Democrats amid a government shutdown.)

The Gateway project would significantly increase train capacity across the Hudson and would require big changes at Penn Station.

The Garden’s owners, who own the air rights for any development above the station, have resisted recent attempts to arrange the arena’s relocation. In 2023, city officials renewed the Garden’s operating permit for an additional five years.

At the time, Mr. Dolan, the chairman of MSG Entertainment, said in an interview: “Another five years and there’ll be some changes in the political structure and we’ll go at it again. Nothing is going to happen.”

In that 2023 interview, Mr. Dolan expressed doubt that the station’s stakeholders would agree on a comprehensive plan to improve it any time soon.

“We never get to the finish line, and it’s because of all the politicking and bureaucracy and because of all the different constituencies,” he said. “I mean, there’s New Jersey Transit, there’s Amtrak, there’s the M.T.A., there’s the governor’s office, there’s the city. And everybody has to say yes. And everybody’s got a stick in the fire.”

The roots of all this dysfunction can be traced back more than a century.

In 1901, Alexander J. Cassatt, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was a frustrated train traveler. To get from Philadelphia to New York City, he had to transfer at his company’s easternmost terminal in Jersey City to a ferry that would carry him the last mile across the Hudson River.

At the time, the country’s rail system was a robust collection of independent companies vying for prominence on the most popular routes. Collaboration was never in their DNA.

His railroad’s main rival, the New York Central Railroad, had already built itself a terminal in the heart of Manhattan, which later became Grand Central Terminal. Mr. Cassatt burned for a competitive foothold in the nation’s largest city.

“We must find a way to cross,” he said, according to “Conquering Gotham,” a 2007 book by Jill Jonnes.

Within 10 years, Mr. Cassatt’s company had completed the unprecedented feat of digging a tunnel under the Hudson to connect to a station it had created west of Seventh Avenue in Midtown: the new Pennsylvania Station.

The Pennsylvania Railroad, commonly known as the Pennsy, declared that the station would have “the character of a monumental gateway and entrance to a great metropolis.”

When it opened in 1910, it was heralded as the largest building ever built at one time. Modeled after the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, the Beaux-Arts station was constructed of pink granite, travertine marble and glass skylights.

Unlike now, arriving passengers ascended into a palatial train hall with an airy concourse topped by vaulted ceilings.

“In our history, there was never another building like Pennsylvania Station,” the architect Philip Johnson wrote. “It compares to the great cathedrals of Europe.”

The tracks connected the station to new tunnels under the East River, as well as the Hudson, allowing trains to reach Manhattan from the east and the west.

Then, in the 1960s, the glorious original station was torn down to make way for the Garden, and train riders were moved underground. The demolition of Penn became a rallying cry for preservationists.

Originally, Penn Station was the province of the Pennsy’s intercity trains and Long Island Rail Road commuter service.

That centralized control could have continued after the mid-1960s if not for one critical error, said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University.

In 1965, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller had New York buy the struggling L.I.R.R. for $65 million and created the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to manage it. William J. Ronan, the man Mr. Rockefeller hired to run the authority, told Mr. Moss that Rockefeller had passed up the opportunity to also acquire Penn Station for a price that would seem like a screaming bargain today, Mr. Moss recounted.

“He felt that was a terrific mistake,” Mr. Moss said, recalling their conversation at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, Fla., about 12 years ago.

“The fundamental original sin was not buying Penn Station,” said Mr. Moss, a critic of how Amtrak has managed the station. “That’s the key error, and that has created a lack of clarity about who controls Penn Station.”

Instead, the M.T.A. wound up as a tenant of Amtrak, the federal corporation that inherited many of the Pennsy’s assets after a 1970 bankruptcy.

More than a thousand steel support beams contribute to a cramped feeling on the platforms.

Like NJ Transit, the L.I.R.R., the busiest commuter railroad in the country, has carved out its own separate and unequal territory within Penn Station.

The dividing lines are clear, at least to those who understand the station’s entrenched rules of engagement, as Janno Lieber, the chairman of the M.T.A., does.

Standing beneath a tangle of exposed pipes and wires in a corridor known as the Hilton Passageway, Mr. Lieber explained that each of the railroads is responsible for maintaining its own turf, including the platforms and tracks that only it can use.

North of the passageway, his agency handles the waxing of the floors and the cleaning of the restrooms. Its police force patrols the concourses.

South of the passageway, those burdens fall on NJ Transit, a perennially struggling state-run corporation. Its workers, clad in fluorescent green T-shirts, replace lightbulbs and scrub the metal prison-style toilets.

The station has several street-level entrances leading down to the various railroads’ concourses.

Each railroad has its own dedicated entrance at the front of the station on Seventh Avenue.

NJ Transit’s leads to a waiting area that is cooled by a fleet of large, portable air-conditioners whose exhaust is vented through white ducts that snake up to the ceiling. The cramped area is known to commuters as “the pit” because of how crowded it gets during evening rush hour.

L.I.R.R. customers enter through a broad concourse that was recently widened, brightened and filled with cafes and fast-food shops. Mr. Lieber called it “a much more functional environment” that had come about because the transportation authority chose not to wait for an agreement with the other railroads and, on its own, overhauled just the areas it managed.

“We kind of took control of our destiny and said this can’t go on any longer,” Mr. Lieber said.

Untangling the knot of Penn Station’s shortcomings is a challenge that has long stymied New York’s most powerful elected officials.

In 2005, Gov. Eliot Spitzer came as close as any governor ever has to clearing the way for a more majestic rebuild of Penn Station when Mr. Dolan agreed, in general terms, to the relocation of the Garden across Eighth Avenue.

But the plan met opposition from preservationists. Mr. Dolan wanted to back out, but Mr. Spitzer, who called himself a “bulldozer,” plowed ahead. In March 2008, the two men had a tense meeting that Mr. Dolan later recounted to a New York Times reporter. “He was tough,” Mr. Dolan said of the governor.

A week later, Mr. Spitzer was caught up in a prostitution scandal and resigned. By the end of the month, Mr. Dolan’s company announced that the Garden was “not moving,” effectively killing any hopes for Mr. Spitzer’s plan.

Several years passed before another brash Democratic governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, took on the challenge of fixing Penn Station — without trying to move the Garden.

In 2016, Mr. Cuomo unveiled a $3 billion plan to “dramatically renovate” Penn Station, starting with a long-stalled idea to convert the neighboring Farley Building, which had been the General Post Office, into a train hall that would serve as an annex for Penn.

Moynihan Train Hall, shown under construction in 2017, occupies a former post office building on Eighth Avenue.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times

That idea, first broached by Senator Moynihan, had “languished because of a lack of financing, political inertia, squabbles with transportation agencies and the developers’ ambitions,” The Times reported in early 2009.

Mr. Cuomo’s plan centered on a partnership between the state and two of the country’s biggest developers, Related Companies and Vornado.

The governor became intensely involved, even threatening at one point to replace the private partners because they were not moving fast enough. He drove that project over the finish line at the end of 2020, more than 25 years after it was first proposed.

“Moynihan is a really good Phase One; it’s the appetizer,” said Vishaan Chakrabarti, a New York architect who has been calling for a radical overhaul of Penn Station since 2016. “But the main station in the subbasement of the Garden is the entree.”

Transportation experts give credit to Mr. Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations and ran unsuccessfully for mayor this year, for applying his famously abrasive personality to get Moynihan Train Hall finished.

But they also note that the project was much less costly and less complicated than renovating Penn Station. New Jersey had little say in the design of Moynihan, and the fact that many NJ Transit trains are accessible from its glass-roofed hall goes virtually unmentioned inside the building.

As soon as Kathy Hochul succeeded Mr. Cuomo, she made improving Penn Station a priority. Within months of taking office, she stood at a lectern in the station and promised it would be transformed from a “hellhole” into a world-class transit hub.

Some proposals have suggested reorganizing the region’s rail system to have trains continue past Penn, a practice known as through-running.

The M.T.A., which the governor controls, would take the lead on managing a rebuilding plan with an estimated cost of close to $7 billion, she said. Amtrak and NJ Transit accepted supporting roles in the planning.

“It’s going to right the wrongs of the past,” Ms. Hochul said. “It’s going to jump-start something that should have been done a long time ago.”

Ms. Hochul indicated that the state was open to suggestions for how Penn should be improved, and proposals began to roll in. A private developer, ASTM North America, teamed up with Mr. Chakrabarti’s studio, PAU, to propose a design that would require the acquisition and removal of a theater attached to the Garden along Eighth Avenue. Amtrak officials supported the concept, but Mr. Lieber rejected the idea of paying a large sum to Mr. Dolan’s company.

Other architects put forward different ways of renovating the station. Some revived the idea of building a new home for the Garden nearby. Others centered on reorganizing the region’s rail service so that Penn would not have to be expanded at all.

All of them awaited word from New York officials about how and when the project would get rolling.

Can Trump Make It Happen?

After Donald J. Trump was elected president again last November, Ms. Hochul asked him to have the federal government cover most of the cost of a new station, she said. She even floated the idea that it could be renamed after him.

Rather than bankrolling New York’s plan, the Trump administration announced this spring that it had lost faith in the state’s ability to manage the project and reassigned it to Amtrak. Sean P. Duffy, the transportation secretary, appointed Mr. Byford, who earned the nickname “Train Daddy” when he oversaw the city’s subway system from 2018 to early 2020, to take charge of the “transformation” of Penn Station.

Some advocates of the renovation said they worried that Mr. Trump’s involvement would set the project back to square one. But others said that having decision-making power concentrated in a president who sees himself as a builder might be the best recipe for a better Penn.

“He just took over Penn Station,” Mr. Cuomo said in a recent interview. “The M.T.A. was working on it for years and had a whole plan.” The former governor added that he expected that Penn was “going to wind up being Trump Station, in the heart of Manhattan.”

Ms. Hochul responded to the federal intercession by withdrawing New York’s financial commitment.

Sean P. Duffy, left, the transportation secretary, appointed Andy Byford to oversee the rebuilding of Penn Station.

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

In a recent interview, Ms. Hochul said she was not abandoning the project. “I’m just happy that I don’t have to put money in it,” she said.

Recounting a conversation with Mr. Trump, she said she had pointed out that Amtrak owned the station. “Why should we have to pay for a building that’s owned by this other entity?” Ms. Hochul said she had asked Mr. Trump.

Still, she told the president: “We have the possibility of getting this underway before you leave office. Let’s make that our goal,” she recalled. “He agreed.”

Now the future of Penn Station rests with Mr. Byford, who said he had been told to get construction started before the end of 2027. He laid out an accelerated schedule that included a solicitation of bids from private companies that want to serve as the project’s master developer. Amtrak will make a decision by May 2026, he said.

Mr. Byford said the bidding would be “an open and fair competition with no preconceived notions of the outcome, but it will be conducted to a very aggressive timeline.”

He said Amtrak’s longstanding plan to expand the station by taking over all or part of a neighboring block of Midtown was “on hold” to focus attention on the makeover. In the meantime, he said, federal transportation officials will study whether having commuter trains pass through Penn and continue on to stations outside the city instead of turning around — a practice known as through-running — could accommodate projected growth in rail traffic in the region.

Transit advocates have long bemoaned the political morass that has slowed down efforts to fix Penn.

Ms. Ellsworth, a proponent of running the L.I.R.R. and NJ Transit trains through the city and into each other’s territory, said she had been calling for the federal government to put an end to the infighting and red tape that had thwarted all hopes for an improved station.

“We need a parent to come in here and knock heads between the various entities,” she said.

Mr. Dunkelman of Brown University was skeptical that “you’re somehow going to bring in a czar who can wrangle all the separate interests.”

“Maybe the Train Daddy will figure it out and get it done, but the fundamental issue here is not one of personality or incompetence,” he said. “It’s a political octopus built to fail.”

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Video: Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid

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November 30, 2025

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Video: Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid

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Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid

Nearly 200 protesters tried to block federal agents from leaving a parking garage in Lower Manhattan on Saturday. The confrontation appeared to prevent a possible ICE raid nearby, and led to violent clashes between the police and protesters.

: [chanting] “ICE out of New York.”
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New York’s BQE Is Falling Apart. The City Can’t Agree on How to Fix It.

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1 week ago

November 27, 2025

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New York’s BQE Is Falling Apart. The City Can’t Agree on How to Fix It.

The triple cantilever runs along the edge of Brooklyn Heights, a wealthy and politically connected neighborhood. It stands as a symbol of resistance to Robert Moses, the power broker who rammed highways through communities.

When Mr. Moses tried that approach here in the 1940s, Brooklyn Heights residents pushed back, and Mr. Moses rerouted the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway around them.

At the top sits the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a cherished landmark with skyline views where generations of New Yorkers have come for their first date.

Below, two levels of traffic jut out like drawers pulled from a dresser. The highway is the main artery between Brooklyn and Queens, and it is part of Interstate 278, the only road that connects New York’s five boroughs.

The cantilever, which opened in 1954, was designed to be used for 50 years. The risks only go up as it continues to deteriorate year after year, even as its life span has been extended with interim measures. While city officials and transportation engineers say imminent collapse is not a threat, other catastrophes could still strike, like concrete falling off and hitting vehicles.

Since 2018, two New York City mayors — Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams — have announced that they would fix this vital artery. But both administrations were unprepared for the ferocious community opposition to their ideas on how to proceed. Both struggled to build any consensus at all as local residents countered with their own ideas. The endless back and forth led to more delays and inertia.

Traffic on the triple cantilever passes through Brooklyn Heights.

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The standoff over the B.Q.E. has become, more broadly, a symbol of the power that local communities wield over critical infrastructure projects around the nation.

Though community opposition is hardly new, it is thriving today as residents have become more nimble and sophisticated at influencing projects, or halting them entirely. They strategize about just who to target with their ads and protests, assemble technical experts and consultants to argue on their behalf, and extend their reach with email blasts, online petitions and social media.

In Los Angeles, a plan to widen the 710 Freeway, one of the nation’s busiest freight corridors, was canceled in 2022 amid community opposition. A major street improvement project in Detroit was paused last summer, in part over the public’s concerns about its design, while state officials took another approach. And a Buffalo project championed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to reconnect communities divided by a highway stalled recently after a state court ruled in favor of critics.

This community pushback is often characterized as NIMBYism — the “not in my backyard” impediment to change — but the reality is more nuanced. Many Brooklyn residents say they are not against improving the B.Q.E., and, in fact, are fighting for a better future with less traffic and more space for people.

But now, time is running out for the triple cantilever.

A highway in decay

The cantilever structure anchors a 1.5-mile stretch from Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street that is owned by the city. The rest of the 16-mile highway belongs to the state.

Source: OpenStreetMaps.

The New York Times

Even before the latest effort, state transportation officials had sought to rehabilitate the cantilever section in 2006. They dropped the project in 2011, citing fiscal concerns and other priorities. That left the problem to the city.

The triple cantilever was increasingly flagged for potential safety hazards, said Bojidar Yanev, a former city transportation official who oversaw inspections from 1989 to 2018. “The structure was unraveling,” he said.

Since at least 1996, the city has fastened metal mesh sheets to the underside of the roadway, particularly below joints, as a stop-gap measure to hold crumbling concrete in place and prevent accidents.

Photo by Helmuth Rosales/The New York Times

The growing areas protected by the mesh sheets became the most visible sign of the triple cantilever’s decay. It was not easy to inspect the internal structure, which was enclosed in concrete like a catacomb, Dr. Yanev said.

Inspectors cut openings into the walls of the cantilever in 2016, finding that water and road salt had penetrated the structure at the joints. This caused the steel rebars in the concrete to corrode and expand, forcing chunks of concrete to fall off. Without major structural intervention, this degradation progressively weakens the triple cantilever’s strength.

In September, Times reporters captured video of the undersides of the triple cantilever to understand the structure’s current state.

Analysis of the footage revealed hundreds of steel mesh sheets placed along the structure’s undersides, including at the cantilever’s deteriorated joints, to hold the concrete in place.

Note: Locations of steel mesh sheets are based on videos captured in September by The Times of the triple cantilever’s undersides.

The New York Times

City officials say the triple cantilever is safe until at least 2029, with current protective measures. They closely monitor the structure and have taken steps to stabilize it, including making repairs and installing sensors to ticket overweight trucks. After that time, the city may have to further restrict traffic to reduce weight on the cantilever.

First wave of ideas

Mayor de Blasio’s administration presented two options in 2018 to rebuild the cantilever, touching off the fiercest battle over the B.Q.E. since it was built.

Polly Trottenberg, then the city transportation commissioner, told residents in Brooklyn at the time that “none of the options are going to be very lovable, and that’s the challenge we face.”

One option would rebuild the highway lane by lane and reroute traffic around the construction. The more controversial proposal, favored by the city, would erect a temporary six-lane highway over the promenade while the lower decks were rebuilt.

Both options would mean losing access to the promenade for years, but the temporary highway would also bring traffic, noise and pollution right to the doors of Brooklyn Heights.

City’s idea: Temporary highway

Furious residents rallied to save the promenade. They raised tens of thousands of dollars to fund their campaign, hired public relations and lobbying consultants, and started a petition that garnered more than 70,000 signatures.

Of course, the promenade itself was born from an earlier fight with Mr. Moses. In 1942, the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper learned that a new highway could cut through the neighborhood and warned: “Plan for Express Highway Through Heights Is Shocking.”

Residents demanded that it be pushed toward the industrial waterfront and suggested building a “double-decker highway” to take up a smaller footprint, and a roof to cover the noise and fumes — which became the promenade.

Mr. Moses later wrote that “the two shelves of the cantilevers carrying commercial traffic and the overhanging cantilever roof for the promenade and park were designed for the greatest benefit to the Heights.”

A view of the promenade then and now.

The New York Times archives (left); Bedel Saget/The New York Times

This time, many Brooklyn residents, as well as architects and urban planners, looked to places like San Francisco, Seattle and Rochester, N.Y., that have torn down or repurposed highways to reconnect neighbors and create more housing, parks and transit.

Two alternatives to the city’s ideas illustrate how Brooklyn residents see this as an opportunity to make radical changes that would benefit their neighborhoods and the city.

Mark R. Baker, a lawyer, businessman and parks activist, proposed in 2019 to move all the traffic to street level and enclose it in a ventilated tunnel. The cantilever would become a three-level park, called the “Tri-Line,” similar to Manhattan’s High Line.

“We had to protect the promenade, which is one of the most spectacular open spaces in New York City or the world, really,” Mr. Baker said.

Alternative idea: The ‘Tri-Line’

Roy Sloane, a graphic artist and advertising executive, advocated for his earlier idea from 2010 for a tunnel, which would help divert traffic away from the cantilever section.

The “Cross Downtown Brooklyn Tunnel” — which would become the new alignment for Interstate 278 — would alleviate the traffic and pollution that spills off the B.Q.E. onto streets in the area. The triple cantilever could then be rehabilitated for cars and light trucks going between neighborhoods, and, with less traffic, nearby sections of the highway could also be turned into boulevards.

“Through traffic is the issue for the residential neighborhoods that are parallel to the B.Q.E.,” Mr. Sloane said.

Alternative idea: The tunnel

Other notable concepts included one by Bjarke Ingels Group to transform the triple cantilever into “BQ-Park,” a grander version of Mr. Baker’s Tri-Line. The City Council, working with Arup, an engineering firm, floated an idea to demolish the triple cantilever and replace it with a three-mile bypass tunnel.

After hearing from residents, Scott Stringer, then the city comptroller in 2019, jumped in with a proposal to limit the cantilever to trucks, while adding bus and bike lanes and a park.

City officials promised to consider all these ideas. Mr. de Blasio, a former Brooklyn councilman with deep ties to the borough, convened a panel of experts to study the B.Q.E.

The panel reported in January 2020 that the cantilever was in worse shape than believed and called for safety measures, including removing two of the six traffic lanes to reduce vehicle weight.

The steel and concrete triple cantilever has deteriorated over the years, and various ideas to renovate or overhaul it have failed to gain traction.

Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Carlo A. Scissura, who led the panel, said the city was not ready to choose among the various concepts without more comprehensive engineering studies. “It would have just been like, ‘Oh, this looks beautiful, let’s just do it,’ ” he said.

When the coronavirus gripped New York in March 2020, resources shifted to the health crisis, and the momentum to fix the B.Q.E. was lost.

Shortly before leaving office, Mr. de Blasio said the city would postpone a permanent solution and instead spend more than $500 million to shore up the B.Q.E. for 20 years.

Second wave of ideas

After Mr. Adams became mayor in 2022, he decided the B.Q.E. could no longer wait. He hoped to tap into federal infrastructure funds unlocked by the Biden administration and start construction within five years.

Mr. Adams had opposed the city’s temporary highway idea in 2019 as Brooklyn borough president. And his new administration presented three new concepts — “The Stoop,” “The Terraces” and “The Lookout” — that shifted the focus to open space.

The Stoop grew out of community interest in BQ-Park, the idea proposed by Bjarke Ingels Group in 2019. City officials hired the firm to help pressure test BQ-Park, only to find that it could not be built because of infrastructure constraints. The Stoop was developed as an alternative concept, but was later shelved amid criticism from residents about the design.

City’s idea: The Stoop

Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect and urbanist, said that many of the visions for the B.Q.E. did not fully consider engineering and cost constraints. “Communities get enamoured with ideas that aren’t viable, and then they start thinking worse of the ideas that are viable,” he said.

City officials said the B.Q.E. was an important economic artery, and that without it, trucks would jam nearby streets. They tried to strike a balance between a safe, modern highway and quality-of-life concerns, they said.

Since 2022, they have held 30 public meetings about the B.Q.E. In response to feedback, they committed to a plan that would not impact the promenade or Brooklyn Bridge Park, or require taking private property. They helped secure a $5.6 million federal grant to improve neighborhoods along the state-owned sections.

Still, many Brooklyn residents complained about a lack of transparency. They said many of their questions were not fully answered and their suggestions went nowhere.

As public discussion evolved over the years, three broad groups of stakeholders emerged: neighbors, dreamers and pragmatists.

The neighbors saw an opportunity to improve public transit and to reduce the impact of traffic on their health, safety and climate. The dreamers went further and envisioned tearing down the highway for more housing, businesses and parks, and shifting to more sustainable ways to move people and freight. The pragmatists focused on maintaining a vital traffic corridor that would still be needed in the future and fixing a cantilever that had become a safety hazard as soon as possible.

Three broad groups of stakeholders of the B.Q.E. project are neighbors, dreamers and pragmatists — each with its own vision for the future of the expressway.

Bedel Saget / The New York Times

A leading voice of the neighbors was Lara Birnback, the executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, who said the city should develop “a more holistic, forward-thinking solution.” The association, which is part of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway-Environmental Justice Coalition, has called for a corridorwide plan.

“Our perspective at this point is, let’s not spend billions and billions of dollars cementing the status quo, no pun intended, by shoring up the cantilever for 100 years,” Ms. Birnback said.

In the dreamer camp was the Institute for Public Architecture, which highlighted the harmful legacy of the B.Q.E. through community meetings, an oral history project and a documentary by Adam Paul Susaneck, an urban planner. The dreamers asked: What would a future without the B.Q.E. look like?

Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, said he saw a future with more freight moving on the waterways and less reliance on polluting highways like the B.Q.E. He told city transportation officials that he would like them to explore the option of tearing down the cantilever. But he said that option was never presented in community meetings.

Aerial photo by Vincent Alban / The New York Times

Pragmatists like Samuel I. Schwartz, a former chief engineer for the city Transportation Department who established a transportation research program at Hunter College, urged city officials to immediately fix the cantilever and leave amenities like parks to be added later. He pointed to the Williamsburg Bridge as a cautionary lesson. In April 1988, it was shut down for more than a month after decades of neglect, causing widespread chaos.

“There should be urgency,” he said, “because something is going to happen if nothing is done.”

Third wave of ideas

Many New York projects have run into opposition, like the $10 billion plan to replace the Port Authority Bus Terminal that was substantially revised last year with community input. “Community opposition is a way of life,” Mr. Schwartz said. “It doesn’t mean we stop.”

But the B.Q.E. has often seemed adrift, without a strong champion at the helm to build consensus. Communities have a right to speak out, and “the job of government is to hear the voices and then whittle it down into something that works,” Mr. Stringer said.

Brooklyn Councilman Lincoln Restler said the Adams administration has seemed more interested in checking a box than really collaborating with the community. Any plan for the B.Q.E., he added, faces multiple layers of government review and approvals and will require community support to move forward. “We’ve got a long way to go,” he said.

Cars in a traffic jam near the north end of the triple cantilever during rush hour in September.

Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

In 2024, the Adams administration presented another concept for the B.Q.E. — the city’s third attempt — this time emphasizing an engineering solution: a two-level, stacked highway that would be supported on both sides.

City’s idea: Stacked highway

Marc Wouters, an architect and urban planner, countered with yet another idea. In 2019, he had partnered with the Brooklyn Heights Association on a plan to protect the promenade. Since then, he has spent thousands of hours working on his own to take field measurements, build 3-D models and test engineering scenarios.

The result is the “Streamline” plan, which would be quicker to build, cost less than other options, and have minimal impact on the promenade and surrounding area, Mr. Wouters said. It would move all traffic to an expanded bottom deck and repurpose the upper deck for bike lanes and a park.

“I’m hoping that it advances because it does seem to check a lot of boxes off for the community,” he said.

Alternative idea: Streamline plan

Last month, Mayor Adams urged Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to start the environmental review process for the B.Q.E., which would consider a range of plans and allow construction to begin in 2029. “After a fix for the B.Q.E. languished for decades, the Adams administration advanced this project further than ever before to build a safe, resilient highway,” said Anna Correa, a spokeswoman for Mr. Adams, this week.

But a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will take over in January and may have his own ideas. Mr. Mamdani knows that protecting the safety and stability of the B.Q.E. is “an urgent priority for the city,” said his spokeswoman, Dora Pekec. “After years of patchwork fixes that have only offered temporary fixes, the Mamdani administration will work to deliver a permanent solution for the city-owned sections of the B.Q.E. that both meets community needs and preserves this essential transportation corridor,” she said.

That will not be a quick or easy process. Big hurdles remain, including how to pay for the project. It was passed over for federal funding in 2024 and could cost up to $5 billion, depending on the plan chosen.

“I think the B.Q.E. has just bedeviled and frustrated everybody who’s ever driven on it, looked at it, and worked on it — it’s like a curse,” Ms. Birnback said.