Opened February 2, 1913, the Beaux-Arts terminal is the largest train station in the world by platform count, with a main concourse ceiling painted with twelve constellations and 2,500 stars.
The terminal is free to enter with no ticket required — duck into the Whispering Gallery near the Oyster Bar, where two people standing at diagonal corners of the tiled arch can hear each other's whispers.
Grand Central exists because steam locomotives could not be run safely into the middle of Manhattan. On January 8, 1902, a southbound train overran signals in the smoke-filled Park Avenue tunnel and struck the train ahead of it, killing fifteen people, and the state legislature responded by banning steam trains in Manhattan from July 1, 1908. William J. Wilgus, vice president of the New York Central, turned the prohibition into an asset: electric traction meant the approach tracks could be roofed over, and a roof could be sold.
What was sold were air rights. Two levels of track were buried beneath Park Avenue and the blocks above were leased for hotels and offices, the development known as Terminal City, so that the terminal was underwritten by the real estate it had made possible. Inside, the contribution of Reed and Stem was circulation rather than ornament: ramps instead of stairs, so a passenger with luggage never has to climb, and the crowd keeps moving between levels without bunching.
The Main Concourse is 275 feet long, 120 wide and 125 feet to the crown of the vault. Its ceiling was conceived in 1912 by the architect Whitney Warren with the painter Paul César Helleu and executed by Brooklyn's Hewlett-Basing Studio: more than 2,500 stars on turquoise, the largest sixty of them lit from behind. The sky is reversed. Water damage had ruined the original by the 1920s, and in 1944 it was covered over with boards carrying a repainted copy, which is the version overhead today.
The restoration of the 1990s cleaned decades of tar and nicotine off that surface and deliberately left one dark patch, near the crab of Cancer, as evidence of what had been removed. Below the concourse, Guastavino tile vaults over the ramps to the Oyster Bar produce the whispering gallery. The four-faced clock's dials are opalescent glass, 24 inches across, not the opal of legend. The building survived a tower proposal because Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, decided in 1978, upheld the city's landmarks law.
89 E 42nd St, New York, NY 10017 · Official site ↗
Grand Central Terminal is a commuter rail terminal at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Grand Central is the southern terminus of the Metro-North Railroad's Harlem, Hudson and New Haven Lines, serving the northern parts of the New York metropolitan area. It also serves the Long Island Rail Road through Grand Central Madison, a 16-acre (6.5 ha) addition to the station located underneath the Metro-North tracks, built from 2007 to 2023. The terminal also connects to the New York City Subway at the Grand Central–42nd Street station. The terminal is the third-busiest train station in North America, after New York Penn Station and Toronto Union Station.
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