ASTM

ASTM’s team includes Severud Associates, longtime engineers for the Garden, as well as two architecture firms, PAU, based in New York and run by Vishaan Chakrabarti, who has toiled for years on various Garden renovation plans, and HOK, which oversaw the new Terminal B at La Guardia Airport.

For now I leave to others the plausibility of the $6 billion figure and ASTM’s guarantee about covering overruns.

Seeking inspiration from exalted precedents like Grand Central Terminal and Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, ASTM’s architecture at this early stage is a little stiff and self-serious but it clearly conveys the all-important point that a gateway worthy of New York, and of the millions of working people who rely on it, needs to offer more than high ceilings, clear signage and hot bagels.

The private company handling that project for the M.T.A. is Halmar International, a subsidiary of ASTM.

It’s in this context, I think, that we may decipher the peculiar media event that Ms. Hochul’s handlers hastily organized last week — timed, it seemed, to upstage ASTM’s release a couple of days later of its latest drawings and budget.