Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine is backing a plan to overhaul Pennsylvania Station that would leave Madison Square Garden on top of the transit hub but calls for the demolition of its adjacent amphitheater to create a grand new entrance to the complex on 8th Avenue.
Levine’s plan echoes key proposals made by an Italian design firm, ASTM, that shocked officials when it jumped into the competition to overhaul the notorious Midtown railroad and subways hub with a proposal that focused on a grand new West Side entrance.
The ASTM proposal emerged as plummeting commercial real estate values undercut the original plan offered by two successive governors — the disgraced Andrew Cuomo and his successor, Kathy Hochul — to build new office towers around the station and use the revenues to finance a 7th Avenue-focused overhaul of the station.
“I don’t want to lose this opportunity, I want to lock in a plan now,” Levine told The Post.
Levine took pains to say that he was not explicitly endorsing the Italian job, which does not yet have a formal price tag or engineering diagrams, but said that he found its major components attractive.
ATSM has told elected officials it expects to offer additional details about its proposal this summer.
The firm has hired Pat Foye, the former chairman of the MTA, to help make its case to local elected leaders.
It calls for purchasing the Hulu Theater and demolishing it to make way for a new grand entrance along 8th Avenue into Penn Station.
“I like a lot of what they’ve proposed,” he said. “I find compelling the idea of knocking down the theater to build a grand new entrance.”
Levine — like many other Manhattan lawmakers over the years — added that he continues to favor the eventual relocation of Madison Square Garden from the top of Penn, which transit advocates have long argued is necessary to thoroughly overhaul the station’s century-old platform designs.
However, he said the ongoing resistance to a relocation from the Garden’s owner, James Dolan, and continuing struggles to find a replacement site meant that fight should be pushed to the side.
“There’s no viable site imminent,” he added. “We’ve already lost one decade waiting for this and I don’t want lose another decade.”
Levine’s leverage is Dolan’s application to renew his permit to operate the Garden, which must be approved by the City Council.
The zoning process also requires Levine to provide an opinion on the application, though his thumbs-up or thumbs-down is purely advisory.
The MTA’s current leadership — including current chairman Janno Lieber, who served as Foye’s major projects chief — has pushed back hard on the ASTM plan.
“We look forward to a full briefing on these concepts,” said MTA spokesman John McCarthy in March. “However, we remain concerned that the proposal, as described so far, lacks key elements of the Master Plan agreed to by Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and MTA.”