Leading architect on team chosen to redesign Penn Station has a history of anti-Trump social posts

The architect who is part of the consortium awarded the contract to redesign the historic New York Penn Station has a years long history of anti-Trump posts on a now-deleted social media account.  

“With our beautiful brown son growing up with Obama as President, and our beautiful brown daughter now seeing Harris as VP candidate and heir apparent–all with the madness of Trump in between–it’s like having some foul spoiled turkey between two delicious pieces of brown bread,” Vishaan Chakrabarti posted to his X account, which has since been deleted, in August 2020.

This post is one of a handful of posts by Chakrabarti critical of President Donald Trump since he first ran for president in 2016 from the architect who is part of the chosen group that will renovate and transform Penn Station in New York City. 

Chakrabarti is an architect, professor, and founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a New York-based design studio. PAU is part of Penn Transformation Partners, a consortium led by construction management firm Halmar International. Other partners include Skanska, a construction company, HOK, a design firm and ASTM, an Italian construction firm.

Chakrabarti’s history of anti-Trump posts dates back to at least the politician and New York real estate developer's first run for president, screenshots obtained by Just the News show. 

“Like each of us, #Hillary can at times be her worst enemy. Like few of us, #Trump is the worst enemy of all that’s good in the USA,” Chakrabarti posted in July 2016.  

You can read three of Chakrabarti's posts below: 

The Department of Transportation announced this week that the administration has selected the Penn Transformation Partners as “the private Master Developer team” that will lead the project. 

“We took over the transformation of New York Penn Station because the project was behind schedule, over budget, and hopelessly mismanaged. One year later, we continue to hit major milestones at record speed,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy in a statement. 

Duffy: "2027 can’t come soon enough"

In selecting Penn Transformation Partners and their innovative plan, we are one step closer to delivering a world-class travel hub that daily commuters and travelers have dreamed of for decades. Under President Trump’s historic leadership, the days of Penn Station’s cramped hallways, broken infrastructure, and snarled rail lines are numbered. 2027 can’t come soon enough,” he added.

Halmar International did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News. Chakrabarti did not respond to an inquiry sent to his firm, PAU. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment. 

The consortium won out against several other bids, including one proposal pushed by Republican and Trump megadonor Tom Klingenstein which would have completely reimagined the site, restoring the historic station’s more traditional architecture and moving the iconic Madison Square Garden basketball arena to another site. 

But, the plan selected by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the Amtrak Board of Directors is more modest. It includes a redesign of the train station while keeping the basketball arena on the same site. 

After taking office, President Trump’s Department of Transportation (DOT) assumed control of the Penn Station renovation, which suffered from high costs and delays under New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority. The DOT said it would seek a public-private partnership to accelerate the deadline and provide a “safer, more reliable” transportation hub for the city.

According to New York State statistics, Penn Station serves 600,000 commuters and travelers every day, and is the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere. 

In 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced sweeping plans to renovate the central rail hub in a partnership between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New Jersey Transit, and Amtrak. However, the project was plagued by delays due to tensions between the MTA and its private partner and the Biden administration’s rejection of a federal grant application to fund the project. 

The administration has stressed that the new facility should be inspired by the original facade

Chakrabarti’s opinions about the original Penn Station, a classical building torn down for the modern facility, also seem to clash with the Trump administration’s desire to see a renovated facility inspired by that traditional architecture. 

Since the beginning of the project, the administration has stressed that the new facility should be inspired by the original facade, a feat of classical architecture that was demolished in the 1960s to make room for the new Madison Square Garden. 

In one October 2019 post, Chakrabarti expressed his belief that the architects designed the original Penn Station “defensively” because they were “scared of the then African American Tenderloin” neighborhood around it. 

“I understand and agree, and I know it's heresy, but when you study the section of the original Penn as it met the street, it's fairly clear to me that both McKim and Cassat [sic] were scared of the then African American Tenderloin around them and designed defensively against it,” Chakrabarti wrote in the post to X. 

Alexander Cassatt was the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Charles McKim was the architect Cassatt hired to design the station.