MSG Being Evicted In 10 Years

NY Times – Madison Square Garden, home to the Knicks, the Rangers, the Ice Capades, the circus and the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, received an eviction notice of sorts on Wednesday.  The New York City Council notified the arena that it has 10 years to vacate its 45-year-old premises and find a new home, the Garden’s fifth since it opened in 1879. By a vote of 47 to 1, the Council voted to extend the Garden’s special operating permit for merely a decade — not in perpetuity, as the owners of the Garden had requested, or 15 years, as the Bloomberg administration had intended. Ten years should be enough time, officials said, for the Garden to find a new location and for the city to devise plans for an expanded Pennsylvania Station, which currently sits below the Garden, and the redevelopment of the surrounding neighborhood. “This is the first step in finding a new home for Madison Square Garden and building a new Penn Station that is as great as New York and suitable for the 21st century,” said Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. “This is an opportunity to reimagine and redevelop Penn Station as a world-class transportation destination.” Ms. Quinn renewed her call for the creation of a commission to devise the plans. Civic leaders and some developers have long sought to rebuild Penn Station, a cramped and crowded maze for the more than 500,000 people a day who traverse it. But doing so would be an enormously complicated, multibillion-dollar undertaking that has foiled officials in the past. And anything can happen in the next 10 years, including several elections for mayor and governor. James L. Dolan, who controls the Garden, the Knicks and the Rangers, offered a low-key response to the news that barely acknowledged the 10-year deadline. Mr. Dolan expects to complete this fall a $968 million overhaul of the Garden, which has been closing in its off-seasons to accommodate the work.

Here’s the big news out of NYC today. The Knicks and Rangers are gonna have to find a new home in a few years. MSG getting the boot from that area. To be honest I don’t even understand this. I don’t get how it can even happen. Its a top 5 landmark in NYC. Its a major sports arena. They just did a fuckin billion dollar renovation on the current one. Where the fuck would you put a new MSG? Where that proposed Jets stadium was gonna be? And do you just blow up the old one? This just seems so fucking weird to me, I don’t understand any of it. I mean I completely get the idea that they want to redo Penn Station. That place is literally hell on earth. But to be like “Oh yea we’ll just make the New York Knicks and New York Rangers move to fix Penn” seems to be a pretty drastic idea. Maybe we’ll just pick up the Empire State Building and move that somewhere too like fucking Carmen Sandiego.

There’s no doubt in my mind this is Prokhorov’s doing. Render the Knicks homeless like the sheisty, cut throat ruskie that he is. Such Putin-esque tactics. Dude is probably gonna spend the next 10 years buying up all available land where a new MSG could go so that he can run the Knicks out of town. By 2023 the Knicks are gonna be out there playing in the old Brendan Byrne Arena in the swamps of Jersey.

PS – Props to the 1 vote against this idea. That guy was like “Fucccccccck this. This is a terrible idea”

PPS – Theres no way this actually happens. Right?