Gov. Kathy Hochul said Manhattan’s Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station will keep its name — despite President Trump requesting that the major hub be renamed after him.
“It will over my dead body,” Hochul said when asked Thursday whether the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s name should remain on the Midtown transit hub.
“We are not messing with that man’s memory,” she added.
Hochul, who was speaking at the Association for a Better New York breakfast at Cipriani Wall Street, went on to wax poetic about her time working for the Democratic senator when she was a young attorney in her 20s.
“My dream was, all I wanted to do, is be a staffer for a senator someday,” she said. “And when I was hired by Senator Moynihan, it felt like such a privilege.
“He showed me what statesmanship was all about,” she said. “He showed me how to work across the aisle in a way that is very foreign today.”
Moynihan, who died in 2003, had championed the train hall project, which opened in 2021, providing new space for the Long Island Rail Road and Amtrak.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly rebuffed Trump’s offer in January that he’d free $16 billion in federal funds for the Gateway tunnel project if the New York Democrat backed renaming the train station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport for him.
But Schumer told the president that he didn’t have the power to deliver on the unusual request, according to CNN.
Trump unfroze the Gateway funding, but no name changes have been announced.
Hochul was also asked last year if she’d be open to renaming either Penn Station or Moynihan Train Hall for Trump if he put in the money for a grand Penn Station redesign, after the feds yanked the project from the MTA and handed it to Amtrak and the US Department of Transportation.
“Hell no,” she said at the time, but joked that if Trump put in around $7 billion for the train hub revamp, “who knows?”
