by Sam Roberts
In 1903, the New York Central Railroad invited the nation’s leading architects to submit designs for the new terminal. McKim, Mead & White proposed a sixty-story skyscraper—the world’s tallest—topped by a three-hundred-foot plume of steam to serve as a beacon for ships and an advertisement (if an anachronistic one by then) for the railroad. Its chief competitor was Reed & Stem (a firm that might have been mistaken for landscape architects, but had designed other stations for the Central); moreover, Allen Stem was Wilgus’s brother-in-law. But another firm, Warren & Wetmore, which had designed the New York Yacht Club, boasted an even more enviable connection: Whitney Warren was a cousin of William Vanderbilt, the Central’s chairman. To keep peace in the family, the railroad enlisted both firms, in what would prove to be a fractious partnership. The mammoth undertaking meant not just building a new terminal while the old station was still operating, but also bridging a fourteen-block-long, 770-foot-wide “death alley” that the railroad had created. Wilgus not only met the state’s deadline to electrify the line in Manhattan, he beat it by two years. In 1906, the first electric locomotive barreled through the Park Avenue Tunnel from High Bridge in upper Manhattan.
Since then, Grand Central has handled New York’s tidal flow of commuters as well as long-distance travelers to points north, south, and west. For a single building, one that was far too squat to scrape the skyline, much less define it, Grand Central also threaded its way into the nation’s culture. The terminal manifested itself in the red-carpet treatment of travelers to Chicago on the luxury Twentieth Century Limited, in films like Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, and as Lex Luthor’s underground lair in Superman (Lex boasts of his Park Avenue address, to which his secretary scoffs: “Park Avenue address? Two hundred feet below?”) and where Mad Men’s Roger Sterling gorges himself on oysters and martinis. It became so synonymous with bustle that merely invoking its name by saying “this place is like Grand Central” entered the lexicon as a metaphor for choreographed chaos.
Grand Central proved to be transformative in other ways. Wilgus introduced the largely stairless terminal by providing ramps for passengers with luggage (they were so innovative that one newspaper felt compelled to explain them to readers by invoking the sloping earthworks built by Julius Caesar to the ramparts when he besieged a city). If Wilgus didn’t conjure up out of thin air the legal principle of monetizing empty space over property, he was the first to apply the potential value of air rights on a scale that not only spurred real estate development in East Midtown that would establish some of Manhattan’s most elegant residential addresses, but enabled the railroad to profit from vast holdings that New Yorkers had previously regarded as a dangerous eyesore. Grand Central is where standard time began after the railroads, rather than the government, imposed four time zones; and where the migration of Manhattanites to the Bronx and to the Westchester and Connecticut suburbs accelerated after the New York Central Railroad popularized the practice of commuting the cost of single rides for regular monthly passengers and, with that innovation, immortalized the term “commuter.”
The terminal was also at the center of groundbreaking political movements, first as the birthplace of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which was organized by employees there, and, under leader A. Philip Randolph, became not only a progressive union but an early voice for civil rights. Grand Central also emerged as the poster building for the preservation movement after Pennsylvania Station across town was wantonly destroyed by developers. Civic-minded New Yorkers, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, persuaded the city to declare Grand Central an official landmark, frustrating owners of the cash-starved railroad who had hoped to revive Wilgus’s early vision and, while obliterating parts of the terminal, reap the profits from building an office tower above it. In 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the city’s power to designate Grand Central as a landmark, the case became a paradigm of public welfare trumping private property. Moreover, the city’s landmarks law became a catalyst for similar preservation movements across the country. And while Wilgus’s vision of a Romanesque Terminal City never fully materialized, Grand Central profoundly transformed eastern midtown—and would continue to do so for more than a century, to a much greater degree than Penn Station influenced its immediate neighborhood.
After deteriorating in the 1970s and ’80s into a shabby dormitory for the homeless, the spared terminal was given a miraculous revival in the 1990s, in an inspiring and prototypical alliance between the public Metropolitan Transportation Authority and private partners—a partnership that evoked Robert A. M. Stern’s observation that by envisioning a great public space in the early 1900s, Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore created “a convincing expression of the belief that the goals of capitalism are not inimical to the enhancement of the public realm.” In Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economics professor, wrote of Grand Central: “It is a magical place with a history that captures the city’s early growth, post-1970 fiscal crisis, and subsequent rebirth.”
On the weekend Grand Central opened in 1913, thousands came to gape. The metrics alone were amazing. The Times gushed that the ceiling was studded with the design of the constellations, sixty-three of the stars illuminated (although, as one commuter immediately noticed, they were painted backward, which the railroad, putting on its best face, said represented God’s view of the heavens). The terminal had taken ten years to complete because it was built while the old station was being dismantled and while train service had to be maintained. Fully forty-six acres were excavated. Grand Central boasted the deepest basement of any building in Manhattan (ninety feet below the lower level, which was already forty feet beneath the street), more than double the acreage and miles of track at Pennsylvania Station and with three times as many platforms. Penn Station and its yards spanned twenty-eight acres. Grand Central covered seventy. Penn Station had sixteen miles of rails that converged into twenty-one tracks serving eleven platforms. Grand Central had thirty-two miles of rails, forty-six tracks, and thirty platforms—an ambitious construction project, as Mike Wallace, the author of Greater Gotham, wrote in 2017, that was emblematic of the city’s “intense quest for connectivity in the two decades between the consolidation of Greater New York and the First World War.” Wallace concluded that “not only did its expansion and electrification aim to boost the volume and velocity of passenger traffic, but it was a circulatory marvel.”
The Central spared no amenity. The Times hailed the terminal as “a monument, a civic center, or, if one will, a city.” Fully a century later, the journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe wrote: “Every big city had a railroad station with grand—to the point of glorious—classical architecture—dazzled and intimidated, the great architects of Greece and Rome would have averted their eyes—featuring every sort of dome, soaring ceiling, king-sized column, royal cornice, lordly echo—thanks to the immense volume of the spaces—and the miles of marble, marble, marble—but the grandest, most glorious of all, by far, was Grand Central Station.”
Newspapers across the country touted Grand Central as a scientific and an architectural wonder, dominated by the 125-foot-high main concourse, more than the length of a football field and 125 feet wide. Bare bulbs (voguish again by retro twenty-first-century style, but originally intended to flaunt the railroad’s ingenious embrace of electricity) illuminated the ornate lighting fixtures, which, like the friezes, are festooned with acorns, from the Vanderbilt family crest, suggesting the progenitor of mighty oaks). Grand Central defied the street grid, but a viaduct allowed vehicles on Park Avenue to circumnavigate the terminal. The Oyster Bar was the first and most durable tenant (and just outside the restaurant, visitors anointed an unmarked alcove as “the Whispering Gallery” after discovering that their voices could clearly echo across Rafael Guastavino’s herringbone terra-cotta ceiling). The transplanted Florentine piazza that John Campbell, an eccentric director of the railroad appropriated as his office, was renovated into a trendy bar and given the gussied-up
name of the Campbell Apartment (although he never lived there).
At the terminal’s peak in the late 1940s, a hundred long-distance trains arrived or departed. While Grand Central later lost some of its luster as airport passenger cars supplanted it and passenger cars and inter-city trains were rerouted to Penn Station, the main concourse and its iconic four-faced clock remained, perhaps, the closest thing to an indoor town square in New York. And while the word “terminal” connotes an ending, Grand Central has been the scene of triumphal homecomings and auspicious arrivals to launch careers or invent new lives.
Travelers entered medieval gated cities through triumphal arches. “The city of today has no wall surrounding that may serve, by elaboration, as a pretext to such glorification,” the architect Whitney Warren wrote, “but nonetheless the gateway must exist, and in the case of New York and other cities it is through a tunnel which discharges the human flow in the very center of the city.” Sculpted in limestone in Long Island City, Jules Alexis Coutan’s triumphal fifty-by-sixty-foot mythological trio dominates Grand Central’s southern gateway: Mercury, the god of commerce and travel, flanked by a reclining Hercules, the heroic champion of physical strength and courage, and Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and patron of the arts. Inside the terminal, tens of thousands connect prose and passion as they navigate the vaulted main concourse every day.
“When it opened, in 1913, it was New York’s clearest embodiment of the essential urban idea—that different kinds of buildings work together to make a whole that is far greater than any of its parts,” the architectural critic Paul Goldberger wrote. “If Penn Station was built mainly to send a message about the splendor of arrival, then Grand Central was conceived to make clear the choreography of connection.”
When it opened, it was indisputably grand. As the end of the line, it is a terminal. It made itself central by shifting the city’s center of gravity. (George Samoladas)
20
THE APOLLO
The Apollo and other uptown venues were where white audiences went to see black performers. The neighborhood became the cultural nexus of the Harlem Renaissance. (Billy Vera Collection, ca. 1950s)
The quiet riot that began in Harlem in 1905 may have been the only race war that African Americans waged and won. Their victory proved to be short-lived, though, and it took them all of three decades to fully integrate the neighborhood that became the greatest showplace in black America.
As the twentieth century dawned, two developments converted Harlem into a magnet for African Americans. For starters, a boom in speculative construction begun in anticipation of the new subway lines had created a glut of row houses and apartment buildings uptown. Meanwhile, in neighborhoods like San Juan Hill, Hell’s Kitchen, and the Tenderloin, violent anti-black race riots coupled with the razing of tenements to make way for the mammoth Pennsylvania Station displaced many African American residents, driving them out of western midtown and creating a demand for additional housing elsewhere. Philip A. Payton Jr. shrewdly figured out how to fill it. Trained by his father as a barber, he had dropped out of Livingstone College in North Carolina after a football injury (his two brothers would graduate from Yale), and, after returning home to small-town Massachusetts, resolved to try making his luck in the big city. After working several odd jobs in New York, he entered the real estate business on the ground floor (actually, the basement) as a porter. Within less than a year, he and a partner audaciously started their own real estate agency, which failed—and Payton and his wife learned firsthand what it was like to be evicted.
In July 1904, he distributed a prospectus that bluntly declared: “Race prejudice is a luxury, and, like all luxuries, can be made very expensive in New York City if the negroes will but answer the call of the Afro-American Realty Company.” Answering that call, the prospectus predicted, could not only “turn race prejudice into dollars and cents,” but “the very prejudice which has heretofore worked against us can be turned and used to our profit.” Near the end of 1905, Payton got what proved to be a grimly disguised blessing: a murder was committed in an apartment building on West 133rd Street, which sent frightened white tenants fleeing. Payton approached the landlord and offered to not only fill the vacant apartments with African Americans but also get them to pay five dollars extra in rent. By December 17, 1905, the Times was reporting: “Real Estate Race War Is Started in Harlem.” As Payton’s Afro-American Realty Company began buying up buildings, the article went on to say, “white folks, hat in hand,” who had received dispossess notices had filed into his office on the eve of the Christmas holidays, pleading to remain in their apartments, which the company would be renting to black tenants instead. The “changing neighborhood” bromide was far too static to apply to the revolution that would elevate Philip Payton into “the father of Harlem.”
At first glance, the turf war might have evoked Reconstruction in the South more than it did the Draft Riots in Manhattan. Competing landlords and brokers waged door-to-door warfare as occupancy of apartments seesawed between black and white tenants. After a white-dominated consortium, Hudson Realty Company, bought four apartment buildings on the south side of West 135th Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues and evicted all African American residents, Payton drove white tenants from the two buildings he had bought next door. The standoff ended when Hudson was forced to sell all four buildings to Payton. A Times reporter observed: “A constant stream of furniture trucks loaded with the household effects of a new colony of colored people who are invading the choice locality is pouring into the street. Another equally long procession, moving in the other direction, is carrying away the household goods of the whites from their homes of years.”
The streams flowed on opposite courses, but they never crossed. White and black New Yorkers did not comingle, nor would they. That distinction was starkly drawn in a 1911 Times editorial, which praised white property owners in Harlem for banding together and agreeing to a pact not to sell or rent to African Americans for at least fifteen years. “It states in terms that no discrimination is made against any one because of race or color; that the agreement is made solely for the purpose of preventing depreciations in property values,” the editorial said. The Times generously embraced the solution without assessing blame, specifically absolving “negro speculators.” After all, the editorial continued, “they are taking a smart business revenge, and gaining residences removed from the neighborhoods of the shiftless, diseased, and criminal of their kind, because of the while folks’ prejudice against them.”
While, to white New Yorkers, living with African Americans was out of the question, watching black entertainers—from a respectable distance—was quite another thing. And, as Harlem became a black enclave, the visceral appeal of black performers (not whites in blackface) lured white theatergoers. When downtown clubs closed, whites eagerly flocked to Harlem nightspots. The first major theater in the neighborhood was the Opera House at 207 West 125th Street, near Seventh Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard), built in 1889 by Oscar Hammerstein, a cigar maker and father of the lyricist. It catered to the Russian Jews, Italians, Germans, and Irish, most of them immigrants, who then made Harlem home. In 1913, the Lafayette opened on West 132nd Street, with the Darktown Follies, a song-and-dance show that drew white audiences uptown. And while the Lincoln and the Crescent, down the street, catered solely to African Americans, the Lafayette was the first major theater in the city to integrate—to the degree that blacks were allowed, by separate entrance, in the balconies.
Burlesque was big in New York, and in 1914, Jules Hurtig and Harry Seamon opened their New Burlesque Theater on 125th Street, close to Eighth Avenue (now Frederick Douglass Boulevard). Designed by George Keister, who also designed the Belasco and the Selwyn (now American Airlines) Theatres, it was built by Charles J. Stumpf & Henry Langhoff Company, contractors from Philadelphia. The fifteen-hundred-plus-seat auditorium is filigreed with original classically inspired ornamental designs under a semicircular dome and is one of the
city’s few surviving theaters with two balconies. By the 1920s, it was known as Hurtig & Seamon’s Apollo Theater, the third (with Billy Minsky’s Little Apollo Theater on the same block, as well as one in the Theater District downtown) to be named for the Greek god of music. In 1928, facing cutthroat competition in Harlem, Hurtig and Seamon became producers for the Mutual Burlesque Association, and Minsky took over the Apollo.
The Harlem Renaissance of the late 1920s had largely bypassed the Apollo, but by the end of the decade, black performers began appearing onstage. In 1929, Harlem: An Episode of Life in New York’s Black Belt, by William Jourdan Rapp, who was white, and Wallace Thurman, who was black, opened at the Apollo. In his Times review, J. Brooks Atkinson, as he was then known, was impressed with the play’s “high jinks, sizzling dancing,” and “facility for tossing the facts of life around literally.” He added: “In a country starved for folklore, the Southern negro, with his natural eloquence and with the purity of his spirituals, is an inexhaustible source of material. But the urbanized negro, for all his racial characteristics, represents something new. In due course he will be the subject not merely of workaday playmaking on a familiar last but of earnest, thoughtful drama.”
Minsky, who had turned his attention to his theaters downtown, died in 1932. The Apollo was sold to Sydney Cohen, the president of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America. On January 26, 1934, he reopened the venue as the 125th Street Apollo Theater when Benny Carter and his Orchestra, Ralph Cooper, and Aida Ward performed Jazz à la Carte. When Cohen died, in 1935, Leo Brecher and Frank Schiffman, who were running the Harlem Opera House, assumed control. They instituted a regular vaudeville-variety show format featuring black entertainers whose only other major theatrical venues at the time were the Howard Theater in Washington and the Regal in Chicago. The Apollo’s new format came none too soon. Fiorello H. La Guardia, who became mayor in 1934, suppressed burlesque, and in 1937 banned it entirely, because, he said, it promoted the “incorporation of filth” into society. The conversion of theaters to accommodate movies followed by the installation of wiring and loudspeakers to adapt to talkies might have spelled the death of burlesque and of vaudeville anyway (the latter, generally, was a traveling and less bawdy version of burlesque and was customized to appeal to more middle-class audiences).