The Importance Of Grand Central Terminal | NYC Revealed

**Sanitized Transcript:**

[Music] You cannot come to New York and not come to Grand Central. My favorite part of the station is just walking into the Concourse with the light coming in through the windows; it never ceases to take your breath away. New York City is the heart of America’s train system, with nearly a million rail commuters adding to its population every day. For over a century, this has been made possible thanks to the extensive network of train lines running like arteries in and out of Manhattan. Here, you can find the nation’s busiest rail hubs: the temple that is Grand Central Terminal and the organized chaos that is Pennsylvania Station.

Once marked by a majestic pillared exterior reminiscent of ancient Rome, Penn Station was reduced to a cramped underground maze, but no one could predict how the station’s demolition would change how the city viewed its historical landmarks or who would be there to fight for them. Penn Station may be the country’s busiest rail hub, but Grand Central is the world’s largest. However, the building’s reputation is riddled with scandals, from design blunders to demolitions. It’s also home to a few oddities if you know where to look.

The ceiling is one of the largest mistakes in New York City; it’s 25,000 square feet and it’s completely backward. The over 700 trains entering and exiting the terminal every day bring 250,000 people, creating inevitable challenges. Looking to the future, the city might finally be learning from past mistakes. A new station, more than 20 years in the making, buried deep underneath the terminal, is set to connect millions more riders to this already bustling transit hub.

Here’s how New York City keeps its hundreds of millions of annual rail commuters on track. [Music]

Good morning, tickets please. Good morning! Thank you. It’s a daily ritual we are all familiar with: heads down, coffee in hand, tickets punched. Each morning, conductors collect tickets on a passenger train back for its final stop at 42nd Street Grand Central Terminal. When the overground becomes underground, it’s not too far to go. I keep my satchel with my checks, my radio, extra masks, my printer, and what I call my magic keys—the door keys that allow me to access any train.

Around a third of New York City’s commuters enter by rail, located at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. Grand Central’s 48-acre train terminal houses 44 platforms, more than any other station in the world. Managing this transit hub takes a team of assistant station masters patrolling the terminal’s main concourse.

There are several different duties that we do; we’re all over the terminal. We supervise the overall operation of the terminal, specifically the ushers that stand by the gates and direct passengers to the correct trains, the information booth, and the station master’s office. We also check the departure of trains, ensuring the boards have the correct tracks and that the trains are loading and leaving on time.

We’re on the front lines, making sure that everything is operating smoothly. Side note: it’s New York’s worst-kept secret, but all trains departing Grand Central actually leave a minute later than what’s on the board. But that doesn’t mean people won’t sprint for the train each morning. You can expect to see a train arrive every 58 seconds.

There are four major rail systems traveling in and out of New York City. Down by Penn Station, you have New Jersey Transit, Amtrak, and the Long Island Railroad, all on just 21 tracks, with more than 600,000 passengers passing through each day. As for Grand Central, it’s run by the Metro-North Railroad, a commuter rail service under the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Five lines run 787 miles of track across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, with three of the five lines leading to Grand Central.

We’ve got three distinct lines: the New Haven line, which goes all the way out to Connecticut; the Hudson line; and the Harlem line. They serve a broad range of customers around the region. This system operates like clockwork, with Metro-North’s on-time arrival track record at a whopping 98% systemwide.

Without rail travel, the city’s economy would grind to a halt. Throughout the 19th century, the waterways of the canal age gave way to the railway age, quickly urbanizing the areas and bringing the population to 3.4 million by the end of the century. Luckily, when Grand Central’s architects designed the station, they did so with the future in mind, creating a building that could withstand a lot more traffic than it needed to at the time.

They learned this lesson from its predecessor, Grand Central Depot, which was built in 1871 when commuter traffic was growing exponentially. New platforms were built faster than you can say “all aboard,” but it couldn’t keep up. The depot was demolished in 1899, and over the next 14 years, the space was transformed into the terminal we know today.

Cornelius Vanderbilt built the first Grand Central Depot, and then his sons went on to build the Grand Central Terminal we are standing in today. This was supposed to give them importance as a new wealthy family in the Gilded Age of New York. The new and improved Grand Central embraced modernity after smoke from a steam train in a Park Avenue tunnel obstructed the driver’s vision and caused a fatal crash. The city decided to ban steam trains in Manhattan altogether.

Engineer William Wilgus designed the new terminal to be the first large-scale railroad project to switch from steam power to electricity, electrifying miles of track across New York. To prepare for the terminal’s opening, it was intended to compete with Penn Station, which at the time was considered an architectural triumph.

Sixteen hours after opening, Grand Central had 150,000 visitors pass through its doors. This new economic vacuum, along with the expansion of electrified rail lines, brought exponential growth in the city’s suburbs. Handling 22 million passengers in its first year, Grand Central enjoyed a heyday, with commercial development of the nearby zone terminal city expanding as passenger traffic on the commuter line grew.

By 1947, the visitor count was at an all-time high, with Grand Central Terminal playing host to more than half a million people in a single day. Then came a steep drop in popularity with the birth of the jet age and the construction of the interstate highway system.

Starting in the 1950s, the terminal faced proposals for modification and even demolition. One proposal in 1960 suggested converting the main concourse into a three-story bowling alley. Grand Central’s neighbor, Penn Station, faced the same threats and was eventually demolished in 1963. By that time, the once-glorious landmark was past its prime, and the air rights above were far more valuable than any of its insides.

Luckily, the newly founded Landmarks Preservation Commission awarded Grand Central landmark status. The fight to preserve this historic building didn’t stop there. In 1975, talk of voiding its landmark status to make way for commercial development alarmed many New Yorkers who were still recovering from Penn Station’s similar fate. At a press conference in the terminal’s Oyster Bar, Jackie Kennedy said, “If we don’t care about our past, we can’t have very much hope for our future.”

Protecting Grand Central proved to be a wise decision. Today, 250,000 commuters pass through these halls on their way to work, but that’s only a fraction of the 750,000 people that visit the station each day. Much to some commuters’ dismay, this landmark is an icon, often a popular movie location and a stop on everyone’s must-see list.

Like the famous ceiling, backward though it may be, it still draws a crowd. The mural is actually supposed to depict the night sky from a Mediterranean aspect in October. Justin Rivers is Chief Experience Officer of Untapped New York and knows all there is to know about the city’s transportation system, with a special interest in this building.

The story behind it goes back to 1912 when they were building the terminal. Originally, they wanted to put a skylight in the ceiling, but they decided it would be too expensive and bad to maintain due to rain and snow leakage. The architects decided to put a beautiful mural of the night sky instead. They brought in a French artist to depict the night sky, and he chose a famous 1600s sketch of the night sky from a work called Uranometria, which depicts the Mediterranean sky in October.

The artist set up his scaffolding to paint it, but the problem was he held the image on the floor and transposed it up, which flipped it completely around. There’s one constellation that’s correct—Orion—because he was actually turned to face the bull in a fight by the original artist, so he’s not backward; everything else is.

Right over there is a dark black rectangle, which is what the whole ceiling used to look like pre-1994-95. It was thick with soot and cigarette smoke and car emissions coming in through the windows, making it dark and black. When they cleaned it during the restoration process, they left that one little patch as a reminder of what the whole room looked like.

A bit of non-sexy information about Grand Central Terminal: we’re standing on these ramps, which were not put in in the 1990s for ADA accessibility; they were from 1913 when the terminal opened. This was because the engineer for the New York Central, William Wilgus, wanted people to be able to get off the trains downstairs and go all the way up to street level without ever having to go up a set of stairs. It was a revolutionary design for the day, and no other train station or terminal in America had it.

This is probably one of the hottest spots in Grand Central Terminal for someone coming here for the first time trying to find the legendary Whisper Gallery. The Whisper Gallery was not intentionally made for the purpose of standing in opposite corners and speaking quietly to one another; it was just a byproduct of the design done by architect Rafael Guastavino. He created these beautiful vaulted arches, and because of the distance from the floor to the ceiling in the corners, you can have a full-blown conversation facing a wall directly across from someone else.

If you go into one corner, you can talk, and a person in another corner can hear you. No matter how many times I do it, I’m always fascinated by it. Inside the guide booth, very few people know this, but there’s actually a secret staircase that runs from the basement up to this floor, used by MTA employees during the day to access their posts.

In between this floor and the bottom level, there’s actually a sub-level that they only have access to, which has lockers in it. I’ve been told, although I’ve never seen it, that it’s not that great according to the MTA employees.

How does the terminal successfully handle the mass of traffic coming and going 21 hours a day? Well, there’s more to see that lies behind closed doors, keeping the vast system running like clockwork. Hidden on the upper floors, away from the constant hum of commuters and tourists, is Metro-North’s Operations Control Center—essentially the whole system’s brain. From here, rail traffic controllers monitor the comings and goings of all the trains that make up the Metro-North system.

When something does happen, whether it’s a delay or a mechanical problem, the OC hears it from train engineers, conductors, police, or even passengers themselves who can call or send them a tweet. From a sample of 80 events recorded in the rail traffic controller’s log, it led to 1,944 delays, with the most common cause being weather. Delays can also happen if a fire breaks out on the platform or a medical emergency blocks the stream of commuters.

Luckily, you need only wait two New York minutes for Grand Central’s very own fire brigade to arrive at the scene. Our primary role is prevention because we’re here 24/7. In a situation like this, there are just some things that you can’t control. When those things happen—like a medical call for a sick or injured passenger—our team responds and provides emergency medical care.

Our response time is much shorter than waiting for a 911 call and an ambulance to respond through Midtown traffic. We can tend to them and also remove them from the stream of commuters on a train that’s delaying 1,500 other people. The department has been in operation since 1983, responding to an average of 1,700 calls each year, which is about four to five calls a day, with the majority being medical-related.

We see a lot of trip and fall injuries, and while not drawing any scientific conclusions, people are often distracted by their phones and not necessarily being present. We always say to stay back from the platform edge, stay off the yellow warning lines, and pay attention.

Our team is equipped with specialized equipment for the terminal, including slim down electric fire trucks and cordless fans. We have our own internal fire pumps built into the building. While that’s not a unique feature, the size of our system makes it more important. Most buildings have an internal standpipe system, but here, every couple of hundred feet, there’s a place for a hose connection.

One preventative safety measure taken in 1986 was removing public storage lockers from the concourse. So if you happen to lose something, not just in the terminal but on any of the trains, you’re likely to find it back at Grand Central’s lost and found facility. In an average year, upwards of 30,000 pieces of property are recovered, with a return rate of over 55%.

There are a lot of customers who think, “I lost my iPhone today; how many iPhones could you possibly have recovered?” They think their iPhone is unique, but unfortunately, we could have received 20 or 25 iPhones in just that day. A Paralympian even recovered his lost prosthetic leg, which was worth several thousand dollars. These weren’t just regular prosthetics; they were custom-fitted carbon fiber types, like the Blade Runner kind.

Among their massive collection, unique finds have included a diamond engagement ring, an urn filled with ashes, and even a pet rabbit. Property that isn’t returned to customers is disposed of according to property law. There’s a vendor that purchases property from us, including items from the Long Island Railroad and Greyhound bus, and their business is to purchase unclaimed property and resell it.

[Music] Metro-North Railroad is big and busy, but with a record 91 million annual riders in 2019, the first prize for the country’s largest commuter rail goes to the Long Island Railroad. However, this line is notoriously crowded and has what seems to some commuters like near-endless delays.

To relieve these concerns, something is happening 150 feet deep in the terminal caverns. A new line is being drawn onto the map several stories below where we are now. We’re putting the finishing touches on the East Side Access concourse, which will provide unprecedented service for the Long Island Railroad, bringing service not only into Penn Station but here into Grand Central.

This opens up East Midtown to Long Island Railroad commuters, making it much easier for them to make these connections. Costing a whopping $11 billion—more than 2.5 times its original budget—the East Side Access is the Long Island Railroad’s first expansion in more than a century. It’s expected to relieve an overcrowded Penn Station of more than half of its peak congestion—about 162,000 riders—by rerouting Long Island commuters straight to East Midtown instead and cutting 40 minutes off commute time in the process.

People have been talking about East Side Access for generations, and it is close to becoming a reality. For years, right beneath one of the busiest areas of the city, workers have been blasting and carving the new terminal out of bedrock 14 stories below.

The idea is nothing new; it’s been in the works for almost half a century. The plans originated in the late 1960s as part of a proposal for the new Third Avenue Long Island Railroad terminal called The Metropolitan Transportation Center, with a two-level tunnel lining 63rd Street under the East River. By 1980, after local pushback and financial troubles, the project was abandoned, with the upper tracks eventually joining the F train service in 1989.

As for the lower-level tracks, they were left to gather dust, and the New York Times called them a “dead end to nowhere.” That was until 1998 when it was decided that East Side Access could be the solution to all of Penn Station’s congestion. Finally, plans were underway for a terminal under Grand Central, with construction beginning in 2001.

The new terminal’s concourse reflects Grand Central’s Beaux-Arts style, even using the same marble from quarries in Italy and Turkey that make up the main concourse. It’s scheduled to open to the public in December 2022, giving passengers a much-needed change of service and a change of scenery to boot.

People from Metro-North territory can go down a couple of stories and hop on a Long Island Railroad train to all the great destinations on Long Island and vice versa. This will provide regional connectivity that really doesn’t exist in the same way now. When Long Island’s commuters finally get that long-awaited East Side Access, Grand Central’s hustle and bustle is bound to break records.

In fact, East Side Access is just the beginning of a citywide transit expansion. Amtrak’s Gateway program is in the planning stages of creating four mainline tracks between Penn Station and Newark, which will add a two-track Hudson River tunnel and strengthen infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor, the busiest passenger rail line in the country.

As for the future of Penn Station, the newly completed Moynihan Train Hall upstairs has revived the element of grandeur, not to mention personal space not felt in the station since Madison Square Garden took over the street level.

The hustle and bustle is nothing like the feeling out here at about 5:30 on a weekday afternoon—a very different feeling from the morning rush hour. There’s a certain vibe to it that you don’t get before or after; it’s only in that small window of time. I would say that’s one of my favorite things: the hustle and bustle of it.

This is the greatest region on Earth, and it deserves to have the best transportation networks as well. There isn’t a railway network anywhere in the country more extensive and lively than the one surrounding New York City. Centuries of economic and cultural growth have woven a web of stone and steel, with Grand Central Terminal standing proudly at the center.

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