Next stop: Trump Station!
We hear that President Trump held a secret meeting with Madison Square Garden boss James Dolan last week about the plans for Penn Station — and pushed for his own name to be slapped on the 34th Street hub.
A spokesperson for Dolan did not comment.
White House Spokesman Davis Ingle tells us, “President Trump is focused on saving our country – not garnering recognition. While we don’t comment on private meetings that may or may not have happened, President Trump undoubtedly supports a strong and revitalized Penn Station that can better serve New York and New Yorkers.”
The request has been shut down before. When Governor Kathy Hochul was asked if she would be open to renaming the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station for Trump in March, she said, “over my dead body.” Last year, she’d said, “Hell no,” but joked that if Trump put in around $7 billion for the train hub renovations, “Who knows?”
Plans to overhaul the notoriously dingy Penn, which is owned by Amtrak, have been in the works for years — but the famed stadium is a major problem.
There are three finalist for “master developer” in the running, with a decision set to be made in May.
One plan “proposes relocating Madison Square Garden from its current location atop the station to an adjacent spot in midtown Manhattan — a move that would require the agreement of James Dolan,” says a report in Politico.
But as recently as 2023, Dolan was defiant, saying, “No. I’m not gonna move Madison Square Garden. It’s in a good place right now.”
But now that the Trump Administration is involved, he may have softened.
In April 2025, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced it was going to weigh in.
In March, Gothamist reported that Trump and a “delegation of politically connected Trump supporters floated the plan during a closed-door Oval Office meeting in September” and that he “said he’d take a plan to rebuild Penn Station and relocate Madison Square Garden seriously if the arena’s influential owner is willing to play ball, according to sources familiar with the talks.”
NBC News previously reported that the Trump administration asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to support renaming Penn Station and Dulles airport after him in exchange for releasing money for a separate rail tunnel project. Schumer rejected the offer and Trump still later released the funding.
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