A major Manhattan landlord that could stand to benefit from the reconstruction of Penn Station has a stake in one of the three proposals being considered by President Donald Trump’s administration to remake the rail hub.
Vornado Realty Trust, which owns much of the commercial property surrounding the Midtown station, is listed as a “team member” of the “Penn Transformation Partners” proposal being spearheaded by the construction firm Halmar, according to a document quietly published last week by Amtrak, which owns the station. Vornado’s involvement in the proposal had not been previously known, although the company has played a central role in the years-long debate over how to remake North America’s busiest train station.
Vornado’s participation revives the possibility that Penn Station’s rebuild could include a more widespread redevelopment of the surrounding neighborhood, mirroring a plan once proposed by ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo. The Trump administration seized control of Penn Station’s renovation from the state last year, and has told potential developers that it is open to ideas that go “outside of the station and/or Amtrak’s property boundaries,” Gothamist reported.
A spokesperson for Vornado declined to comment. Peter Cipriano, a Halmar executive leading the company’s Penn proposal, also declined to comment. Vornado CEO Steven Roth previously told investors in November that his company planned to get involved, “primarily with respect to the retail that we dominate in the station and in the surround[ing area].”
Vornado had once been set to play a huge role in the Penn project. Under the initial plan hatched by Cuomo in 2021, Vornado would have been allowed to build about 10 office towers around the station, then make payments in lieu of taxes to the state to fund the station’s renovation. The idea came under heavy criticism from local officials, who objected to Cuomo’s bid to ram the project through without local approvals via a state process that relied on deeming the neighborhood “blighted.”
Critics also noted that Vornado, which was in line for a roughly $1 billion tax break under the proposal, had financial ties to Cuomo — its CEO Steven Roth and his wife gave nearly $400,000 to Cuomo’s state campaigns since 2005, as well as $200,000 to a PAC supporting his mayoral bid last year. (Roth has donated $69,700 to Cuomo’s successor, Kathy Hochul.)
Hochul abandoned the office-tower plan in 2023 after the Covid-19 pandemic tanked the commercial real estate market — though she said the state would move forward separately on a rebuild of the station. After slow progress in the ensuing two years, Trump took control in 2025.
But it remains unclear exactly what the renovation will entail, and whether it will expand the station’s rail capacity or just add more cosmetic changes like a single-level concourse and wider platforms. Amtrak has said it will not release the full proposals of any of the three developers vying to take on the project.
“Could the state just hand over the development rights to Amtrak and have the city tax revenue — instead of getting siphoned off by the state to pay for Penn Station — siphoned off to the feds?”
Also unclear: how much the project will cost, and who will pay for it.
Rachael Fauss, senior policy advisor for the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, said Vornado’s involvement is cause for concern, since it raises the likelihood that the station’s renovation could morph into a neighborhood-wide megaproject that would hinge on tax breaks, if state leaders agreed to it. The Cuomo-era plan would have cost the city about $1.2 billion in foregone property taxes, according to a report at the time by Reinvent Albany and researchers at The New School.
“Could the state just hand over the development rights to Amtrak and have the city tax revenue — instead of getting siphoned off by the state to pay for Penn Station — siphoned off to the feds?” Fauss said.
The public-private scheme that Amtrak is using to rebuild the station often forces taxpayers to repay the developer for its expense — for example, through an added fee on train tickets, Streetsblog reported. Andy Byford, the Amtrak official and former New York City transit chief who is running the Penn project for Trump, conceded last week that he will ask New York City to pay for part of the renovation.
Hochul has said the state no longer plans to pay for the Penn project. Shortly after Trump took control last year, she pulled $1.3 billion in state funds that had previously been earmarked for it.
Vornado owns about 15 buildings spanning 10 million square feet in the blocks around Penn Station. Despite losing out on the Cuomo-era plan, Vornado has continued to pour money into its properties in the area — most recently announcing on Monday that it plans to demolish a set of low-rise buildings along Seventh Avenue and replace them with higher-end retail.
Halmar has been angling for years to rebuild Penn Station, initially trying to convince state leaders to let them take on the project as a public-private partnership before Trump took over. Although its current plan is not public, Halmar and its parent company ASTM previously pitched a $6 billion plan that entailed building a new glassy train hall on Eighth Avenue, on the current site of the Theater at Madison Square Garden.
It’s one of two developer finalists with ties to Trump — Cipriano, Halmar’s executive vice president, worked in the US Transportation Department during Trump’s first term. Besides Vornado, its partners are mainly engineering and architecture firms like HOK and Skanska, as well as Morgan Stanley.
The other Trump-connected project is Grand Penn Partners, a proposal backed by Trump donor Thomas Klingenstein and the conservative National Civic Art Society that proposes building a neoclassical-style station on the current site of Madison Square Garden. It’s also backed by the Australian investment bank Macquarie.
Little is known about the third finalist, “Penn Forward Now,” led by the investment company Fengate. Although an initial shortlist released by Amtrak included only the main developer for each project, the new document shows that Fengate’s partners include Goldman Sachs and the construction company Tutor Perini.
Amtrak has said it will choose a winning developer by May, with the goal of starting construction in 2027.
