New York has a new plan to consider for the renovation of Manhattan’s Penn Station, a design that would keep the famed sports and entertainment venue Madison Square Garden in place and surround it in stone.

ASTM North America, part of global developer ASTM, has refined its vision for the Western Hemisphere's busiest transit hub with a $6 billion proposal that it said presents a more “realistic” and “cost-effective” upgrade than previous concepts.

The plan came just two days after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul officially kicked off what she described as a design process for the project that invites competition from architects and engineering firms. Other plans could still be proposed. The state's standing proposal for Penn Station has a $7 billion cost estimate.

Italy-based ASTM, one of the world’s largest toll road operators and a developer of many global public-private partnership infrastructure projects, said Wednesday its design calls for creating two main train halls with a grand Eighth Avenue entrance leading to an open space with 55-foot high ceilings. ASTM would buy the nearly 5,600-seat Theater at Madison Square Garden to knock it down to make room for the new entrance.

ASTM, which worked with two collaborating architects — Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, and HOK — said its plan would create a new “light-filled and airy” midblock train hall between 31st and 33rd streets that will improve “subway passenger connectivity from Seventh Avenue.”

Unlike previous plans for Penn Station, ASTM said its proposal requires no area development to offset costs. The project will be paid for by a variety of funding sources, including federal loans and grants. ASTM would contribute $1 billion in immediate upfront capital for property acquisition to jump-start the project, including about $500 million to buy the theater space.

Hochul and other officials said this week that funding for the modernization of the train station that’s been described as an eyesore is “decoupling” from the development of area office and other commercial projects led by Vornado Realty Trust.

“ASTM’s plan will solve the litany of issues that have long plagued Penn Station and is the full realization of Gov. Hochul’s own vision,” said ASTM North America CEO Pat Foye in a statement.

ASTM has “spent months speaking with elected officials and community stakeholders to shape a proposal that will improve pedestrian flow, add needed entrances, widen corridors, increase accessibility and create more light and open space. We are confident that this is the plan that New Yorkers deserve, not only because of its innovative design but because our public-private partnership model will lower the financial risk for taxpayers and more effectively deliver a modernized Penn Station in its entirety.”

Contribution from some 18 million square feet of high-end offices, as well as retail, hotel, residential and other developments on eight sites was originally expected to be part of the sources of funding for Penn Station’s overhaul, estimated at $7 billion, and expansion, estimated to cost $13 billion, the state’s economy-promoting arm, Empire State Development, has said.

Now ASTM’s redesigned station would feature an exterior that draws inspiration from the neoclassical McKim, Mead & White-designed James A. Farley Building that contains Moynihan Train Hall across Eighth Avenue.

McKim was also behind the design of the original Penn Station that began service in the fall of 1910 that was “a majestic awe-inspiring space” and “providing a truly triumphant entrance to [America’s] most important city” before it was torn down in 1963, the nonprofit ReThink PennStation NYC said on its website.

ASTM’s proposal “will restore the civic gravitas that has been absent since the 1963 demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s original edifice,” Vishaan Chakrabarti, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism's founder and creative director, said in the statement.

Chakrabarti added that “our new stone facade mirrors and reinterprets McKim’s masonry colonnade across Eighth Avenue at Moynihan Station, creating a great public outdoor room that brings the historical in conversation with the contemporary.”

While ASTM’s project is said to not have been embraced by Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Janno Lieber, it’s received support from the likes of the Municipal Art Society, a nonprofit for urban design, city planning and landmark preservation, and Richard Ravitch, a highly regarded former New York lieutenant governor and former MTA chair who passed away Sunday.

In a recent letter to MTA’s board, Ravitch described ASTM’s plan as “a thoroughly designed and engineered proposal” that features “great practicality.”

ASTM’s “proposal allows for a dynamic interaction between Moynihan and Penn that hasn’t existed for 60 years,” Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the Municipal Art Society, wrote in a recent opinion piece for the New York Daily News. “This proposal needs to be taken seriously by all of the players involved at Penn Station.”

ASTM entered the U.S. construction market after acquiring Halmar International last year.