Grand Central Terminal has been the gateway to the city since it opened to great fanfare at 12:01 Feb. 2, 1913 and the first train left the station — the Boston Express No. 2 — a century ago.
As journalist Sam Roberts explains in his new book, “Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America” (Grand Central Publishing), everything about the terminal is massive, starting from the entrance on 42nd Street. A 13-foot-wide clock, bedecked with the world’s largest display of Tiffany glass, is surrounded by a stunning 48-foot-high limestone sculpture of three mythological figures, Minerva, Mercury and Hercules.
Helayne Seidman
The two most frequently asked questions are: “How do I get out of the building?” and “Where is the bathroom?”
Once inside, a visitor is awed by the 38,000-square-foot concourse, under a celestial ceiling of stars. It is an urban cathedral, New York City’s front door, where, in its first days, red carpets literally were rolled out for train passengers.
And it keeps growing. In 1947, some 65 million passengers arrived and departed from Grand Central, more commonly known as Grand Central Station even though it is a terminus. By 2011, its ridership surpassed 82 million, with Metro-North as the nation’s busiest commuter rail line.
On its hundredth birthday, it is heading toward 100 million commuters.
It took 10 years to build this sprawling 48-acre hub, at the cost of $2 billion in today’s dollar. To lay 67 tracks and build 44 platforms, 3 million cubic yards of earth and rocks had to be excavated.
It’s been ranked by Travel and Leisure magazine as sixth among the world’s most visited attractions.
But its much more than a pretty ediface. The terminal has been the site of ransom demands, mail train robberies and Nazi saboteurs. In “Grand Central,” Roberts explains some of the Terminal’s stories and hidden wonders. A selection:
Let there be light
There are 4,000 bare light bulbs illuminating public areas of the station. When Grand Central opened, most of the city was still lit by gaslight, but the Vanderbilt’s the shipping and railroad magnates who built the station, wanted to boast that it had been wired for electricity. Leaving the bulbs bare was a way to impress the public of its modernity. In 2008, it took six people to switch all the incandescent bulbs to fluorescent.
Nuts!
There are acorns everywhere in the terminal, carved into archways and walls. Because the Vanderbilts had no official family crest, they adopted the acorn as their own, with the motto, “From the little acorn a mighty oak grows.”
A celestial mistake
Gazing up at the station’s ceiling of stars may be heavenly, but upon a closer look the constellations are backwards. An amateur astronomer commuting from New Rochelle in 1913 noticed the stars were in reverse. It’s concave 128-floor high ceiling created a view of the heavens from Aquarius to Cancer in an October sky of 2,500 stars, 59 of them illuminated. Red-faced officials quickly explained that while no mortal had even seen the stars from this vantage point, it actually represented God’s view. Actually, the painters mistakenly looked at the diagram on the floor and copied it from there, rather than holding diagram up at the ceiling.
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100 years of Grand Central
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