The vibrant City Beautiful movement, meanwhile, promoted architectural excellence. Grand Central satisfied both desires, invigorating midtown Manhattan, transforming regional transportation, and shaping the city we know today.
To take an in-depth dive, we suggest visiting the Grand By Design history site full of stories, photographs, and videos. Trade and banking energized New York in the early s, drawing new businesses and people. Growth fueled prosperity, and prosperity fueled more growth. Railroads brought people, profits…and pollution. Trains arriving from the north unhitched their engines at 42nd and towed passenger cars the last few miles downtown by horse. To coordinate their services and save money they agreed to share a new transit hub.
With 42nd Street the southern limit for steam engines, it was the logical station location. Grand Central Depot opened in Three towers represented the three participating railroads. Behind its lofty arches and elegant marble is a marvel of practical design and innovative engineering.
The station not only looked like no other, it functioned like no other, merging elegance with efficiency. Though splendid in its day, the original Grand Central Depot of had become a 19th century relic struggling to meet the demands of a 20th century city. The building lacked modern conveniences and signaling technology, as well as the infrastructure for electric rail lines. And having been designed for three independent railroad companies—with three separate waiting rooms—the terminal was badly outdated, crowded, and inefficient.
On top of that, the old station no longer reflected its surroundings. In , 42nd Street was still a relative backwater. By , it was the vibrant heart of a dynamic, ambitious, and swiftly growing New York City. How to find an architect? Design competitions for major projects were commonplace in the early s, and the railroad launched one in Its innovative scheme featured pedestrian ramps inside, and a ramp-like roadway outside that wrapped around the building to connect the northern and southern halves of Park Avenue.
Were these innovations enough to make Grand Central truly grand? One of the splendors of Grand Central is that its vast, majestic spaces reveal extraordinary attention to the smallest design detail. The architects specified Tennessee marble for the floors, Botticino marble for wall trim, and imitation Caen stone for the walls.
John the Divine. New York is famed as the city that never sleeps. Tourists, commuters, business visitors—New York is a boisterous ballet of coming and going. Grand Central helps keep it moving. Originally, long distance travel was the centerpiece of Grand Central.
Every afternoon, a red carpet unrolled to greet passengers boarding the magnificent 20th Century Limited to Chicago, the glittering gem of the New York Central Railroad from to It was an event. In the s, travelers increasingly took to the air and the highways.
A large advertisement for defense bonds and stamps in Grand Central Terminal, By the s, the equivalent of 40 percent of the U. In , four German spies snuck on to Long Island with plans to destroy key logistical locations in the northeast, including Grand Central.
Find out more about M42 here. For some, that wish was a reality. During his time in office, President Franklin Roosevelt once utilized a secret rail line, Track 61, which provided an underground connection between Grand Central and the nearby Waldorf-Astoria hotel. General John J Pershing also used it on a visit to the city in For much of its history the terminal has served as an important cultural hub for the city of New York.
There was even an art school, established in the s by a group of painters included John Singer Sargent, which offered lessons to hundreds of students before closing in And while the station has provided a backdrop to countless books, movies and television shows, few people realize that during the early days of television, dozens of programs were filmed and broadcast out of studios located above the famed Oyster Bar.
The studios have long since been converted, in part, to a series of private tennis courts. In an effort to ally these fears the U. Later that year they installed a Redstone rocket in the main concourse. To stabilize the rocket in the grand hall, a hole was pierced into the ceiling to secure a wire that held the rocket in place. The massive celestial ceiling that adorns the main concourse is depicted not from earth looking up, but rather from beyond the constellations looking down toward earth through them.
It had to be roomy, but mere roominess would not serve the purpose. In a sense, the very size of the terminal threatened to be a drawback. It must not be too large or seem too large for easy use. The architects set before themselves the problem of planning a station that would be as compact as the little station of a little town.
In a sense then, the new Grand Central Terminal was planned to be one of the "smallest" big stations in the world One of the most conspicuous features of the terminal plans was the obvious effort to systematize every activity with which henceforth it will be astir.
Everything is segregated. When the thing is all done there will be a separate and distinct station for the incoming and outgoing passengers. These stations will be all part of one structure , of course, and it will be the simplest thing in the world to get from one to the other. But they will be distinct. The incoming folk will not meet the outgoing. More important than that, they will not run into one another The "Kissing Galleries.
There are specially designed parts of the station known as the "Kissing Galleries. These galleries run alongside the inclined walks on which the stream of passengers from a train just arrived make their way to the street.
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