Relocating Madison Square Garden would rob New York City visitors of a key experience: a “welcoming portal” atop Pennsylvania Station that for many was their first taste of the Big Apple.
So goes the mindset of New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro, who described the arena as a gathering place for the scattered inhabitants of Westchester, New Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island in his defense of the building’s recent transformation.
“For most of the new millennium, we have torn down our sporting structures around here, buried them under foul concrete graveyards disguised as parking lots,” Vaccaro wrote. “Giants Stadium is a memory, and so is Shea, barely recognizable as people park their Chevys and their Audis and their Hondas where Lawrence Taylor once prowled and Tom Seaver once hurled.”
He went on to call continued mourning for the original Penn Station “ironic,” asserting that the arena is also “a place where history matters.”
“They have taken a wrecking ball to so many warehouses of our memories the last few years,” Vacarro wrote. “Not here. Not yet.” [NYP] — Julie Strickland