A working commuter station that happens to be one of the great interiors in America. Free, open, and the ceiling is backwards on purpose — or by accident, depending who you believe.
Not a station, a terminal
The distinction matters to New Yorkers and is worth getting right: trains terminate here, they do not pass through, so it is Grand Central Terminal and not Grand Central Station. The post office next door is Grand Central Station. This is the sort of thing people will correct you on.
The building opened in 1913, replacing an earlier Grand Central that had gone up in smoke — figuratively and, in 1902, literally, when a train crash in the smoke-filled Park Avenue tunnel killed fifteen people and forced the railroad to electrify. Electrification meant the tracks could be buried, and burying the tracks freed up the land above them, which the railroad then sold. Park Avenue as you see it is built on the roof of the train yard.
The ceiling
Look up. The main concourse ceiling is a Mediterranean sky in gold on cyan, with 2,500 stars, sixty of them lit. The zodiac on it is reversed — you are seeing the sky from the outside, as God would, in the polite explanation, or because the painters worked from a medieval manuscript that was itself drawn backwards, in the less flattering one. The Vanderbilts were told about the error shortly after it opened and declined to fix it.
In the north-west corner, near Cancer, there is a small dark rectangle. That is the ceiling’s original colour, left uncleaned during the 1990s restoration as a reference. The grime is not soot from the trains. It is tar and nicotine from decades of smoking in the concourse.
What else to look at
The clock on the information booth has four faces of opal glass and is the standard meeting point in New York — “under the clock” needs no further address. It has been valued in the millions.
The whispering gallery is the low tiled arch outside the Oyster Bar on the lower level. The Guastavino tilework curves sound along the vault, so two people facing into diagonal corners can hold a conversation at a whisper across a busy passage. It works, and it is free, and almost nobody who walks past knows it is there.
Vanderbilt Hall, off the main concourse, was the waiting room. It is now used for events and markets and is worth the detour for the scale of it.
The Campbell on the west balcony was a private office belonging to a 1920s financier, restored as a cocktail bar. It is not cheap and it does not need to be.
The reason it still exists
By the 1960s the railroad was broke and wanted to demolish it, as they had already demolished the original Penn Station in 1963 — an act of vandalism that New Yorkers have never forgiven. The campaign to save Grand Central went to the Supreme Court in 1978 and won, establishing that landmark preservation law could stand against a property owner’s development rights. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis fronted the fight publicly. There is a plaque.
Come on a weekday morning if you want to see it working, with 750,000 people a day moving through it. Come on a Sunday if you want to photograph it empty.
More Landmarks
Statue of Liberty
A French gift that arrived in 214 crates and spent a year in pieces on an island nobody wanted. The ferry is the ticket — everything else is an upgrade.
Brooklyn Bridge
Fourteen years, three Roeblings and twenty-odd deaths to build. Free to walk, best at seven in the morning, and the direction you cross matters more than the time.
Times Square
Loud, bright, and genuinely worth twenty minutes once. Go after dark, keep your hands on your bag, and do not eat here.