Grand Central

by Sam Roberts

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  FOR MARIE

  THE PERPETUAL URBAN BALLET WITH THE INFORMATION BOOTH AS ITS CENTERPIECE—AN ESTHER WILLIAMS–LIKE VIEW.

  FOREWORD

  PETE HAMILL

  A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN 1945, my mother took me and my brother Tom on a trip from Brooklyn to the place that she once described as Oz: Manhattan. I was ten, my brother two years younger. The war was over, and so was the Depression (although we knew almost nothing about what that word meant). We were going to see Santa Claus. At the place where our father’s favorite newspaper, the Daily News, was made.

  That meant we had to change subways at least twice, crossing platforms, hurrying upstairs and down, and making our way to the Lexington Avenue line, which would take us to 42nd Street. Our final train was packed, the cars hurtling through the tunnels with a kind of squealing ferocity. And then we joined the crowd emptying the car, heading up still more stairs, and out through a last door.

  “Wait,” my mother said. “I want to show you something.”

  And she led us into the largest indoor space I had ever seen. There were people moving across shiny marble floors in many directions and a gigantic clock with four sides, and a large board with numbers and the names of cities. A deep voice kept speaking from somewhere, talking about times and tracks, the voice echoing off the gleaming walls. We were in a place called Grand Central Station.

  There were soldiers there, too, in heavy military coats, and a few sailors in pea jackets. Late arrivals from the war. They all carried duffle bags, but were not in any military formation. They came upstairs from somewhere, some of them wide-eyed and astonished, and they pushed out into the crowd of the immense building. Looking, turning, squinting. And the immense murmur of the crowd was cut open by screams. Screams of joy. Screams of delight. A woman, always a woman, came bursting forward, almost leaping, some with kids tagging behind them, kids younger than Tommy and I were then. The soldier and the woman, the sailor and the woman, embraced each other. Sobbing. And we saw an older man off on the side, suddenly erect, saluting. And then another. And another. And then a young soldier on crutches was there, hauling his bag behind him. And there was nobody to meet him. He just stood there. Staring around him. Looking lost. The trouser of one leg folded and pinned above his knee.

  My mother went to him, to ask him if he needed help. And the three of us led the one-legged soldier to the counter beneath the four-sided clock. A woman behind that counter listened, nodded, pulled a microphone close, and began speaking into it. We could hear the message: “Could the party meeting Corporal Jennings please come to the clock in the center of the terminal?” Years later, I still remembered the name. Jennings. And how, when my mother turned away from him, I saw tears in her eyes.

  A MONTAGE OF 22 PHOTOGRAPHS 118 FEET WIDE WAS UNVEILED IN DECEMBER 1941 ON THE EAST WALL.

  We went on to the old Daily News building, with the gigantic globe in the lobby, and there, beyond many hundreds of kids and parents, was Santa Claus on a kind of throne. I don’t know anymore what toy he handed to me or my brother. I remember vaguely the Christmas music playing in that amazing lobby, and I remember that we ate in a glorious automat, full of the sound of nickels rolling into small trays, and the aromas of fresh bread and coffee. But when we returned to Brooklyn, what I remembered most of all was that gigantic, almost golden room, the clock, the constant movement of strangers, and the men home from the war. In particular, the soldier on crutches, because he had only one leg. Just like my father, who had lost his own left leg after a soccer game in 1927, three years after he arrived from Ireland.

  In all the years that followed, Grand Central, not Times Square, was for me the center of Midtown Manhattan. It still is. A place full of arrivals and departures, of sad farewells and new beginnings. A place charged with time, in the constant presence of clocks and changing schedules and looming appointments. Three decades after I first saw it, I was working for the Daily News, climbing subway stairs, with the energizing urgency of passing time driven by the imminence of deadlines. But it was also a place of rewards too, when the deadlines were met: the magazine shops, the Oyster Bar, the places full of bread and croissants to carry home.

  In this wonderful book, Sam Roberts, another alumnus of the Daily News, tells me many things that I did not know until now about the layers of time in Grand Central. Here are the visionaries who imagined it, the pragmatists who made the visions real, the great craftsmen and workers who transformed it into such a huge, majestic, and glorious fact. Not simply a New York fact. A real, surviving part of the country itself. In novels, poems, and movies, it is woven into the American imagination. Sam Roberts reminds us that in Grand Central the palimpsests have palimpsests. Unveil one buried layer of the story and there is another layer underneath.

  He also reminds us of the bad times in Grand Central’s century-long narrative. The rise of domestic airlines, with rapid service on jets to cities once reached by rail, was an obvious part of the change in Grand Central. But there were also larger factors involved in what seemed to be a tale of steady, irreversible decay. By the 1960s, the economy of New York was changing too. Factories were closing. The commerce of the port was ebbing away. By the late 1970s, the garment district was shrinking. As the old manufacturing jobs vanished, welfare cases escalated, along with homelessness and heroin addiction. You could see panhandlers in Grand Central, and a general grunginess spreading, along with a certain level of fear. Or generalized anxiety. Too often a passenger on a train could not find room on a bench in the waiting room. The homeless seemed there to stay.

  And yet, Grand Central would survive, and flourish anew. The story of its salvation is told in the pages of this book. It was driven by people who wanted to save it from the fate of Penn Station, which had been demolished. They had nothing to gain for themselves. They just wanted this enormous, once-beautiful piece of our lives to continue. One of the most important leaders of this movement was, of course, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who used her prestige and eloquence to get the message to a wide audience. Once again, a combination of visionaries and pragmatists made something glorious. Plans were drawn, and then revised; budgets were cobbled together, and then revised too; work started. But like most good things, it took awhile.

  One Friday morning in the mid-1980s, before the last of the work was done, a fierce snowstorm hit the city. My wife was upstate with our car, in our hideout in Ulster County, so when I finished work I headed to Grand Central for the train. I just missed one, but, having no choice, I bought a ticket for the next one.

  I wandered around the great main room of the station, looking for a bench where I could sip coffee and read a newspaper. There were no benches. They had all been removed to discourage their use as cots for the homeless. So I bought my coffee and went up the stairs at Vanderbilt Avenue, to watch the falling snow.

  I was dressed for the weather, in a ratty ski jacket, equally ratty jeans, and boots and baseball cap. I had finished half the coffee when a woman came through the door from Grand Central, walked toward me at an angle, dropped a quarter into my coffee, and kept moving.

  I laughed out loud.

  She paused. “Oh,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Forge
t it,” I said. “It was very kind of you.”

  I poured the coffee out at the curb, retrieved the quarter, went back downstairs to the station, and gave the coin to a homeless guy.

  Every time I go to Grand Central now, I think of that moment. And of the day, long before, when my mother led that baffled one-legged veteran to the information counter. Millions of people surely have other memories that are triggered simply by the mention of the name. If they read this book, they will think of many things they did not witness, or know. As I do now. Many of them are as grand as the place itself.

  SINCE 1991, THE TERMINAL’S SOUTH AND WEST FAÇADES HAVE BEEN BATHED IN 136,000 WATTS OF FLOODLIGHT AT NIGHT.

  PROLOGUE: THE ACCIDENTAL TERMINAL

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, JANUARY 8, 1902—111 years ago—Train 118, the local from White Plains, was late. It was due at Grand Central Station at 8:15 a.m., but, already behind schedule, it was delayed at 110th Street for nearly five minutes to let another southbound local, this one from Croton, pass ahead of it. Incoming delays to Grand Central were nothing new. After all, since the Park Avenue Tunnel was built in 1875, three railroad companies had shared the four-track main line down Manhattan’s spine. By 1902, the three railroads carried 44,000 passengers every weekday, or 16 million a year, on a total of 177,450 trains—one every 45 seconds during rush hours.

  At the throttle of Train 118 was 36-year-old John M. Wisker. Even on the best of days, Wisker, the mustachioed son of German immigrants, was not a patient man. Although he had worked for the railroad for seven years, he’d spent most of that time as a locomotive fireman and had been promoted only the previous August to engineer, and even then he mostly filled in for full-timers. As an engineer, he usually piloted milk trains, early in the morning before the road became more congested. That week, he had no intention of piling up a record for tardiness, especially on what amounted to a tryout on a prestigious commuter route. Leaving the apartment he shared with his wife in the Bronx, he would ordinarily get to work while it was still dark, though this week, because he was on call, he slept on a bare wooden bench in the roundhouse in White Plains. That, he explained later, made him even more nervous than usual, coupled with the fact that the locomotive he was driving had a record of faulty air brakes.

  On Sunday night, January 5, the regular engineer of Train 118 had called in sick. Wisker was recruited to replace him. On Monday, Wisker piloted a passenger train through the Park Avenue Tunnel for the first time. On Tuesday, Train 118 arrived at Grand Central promptly at 8:15. But on Wednesday, the train was already a minute and a half late when it left White Plains. Wisker was worried about making up lost time in between the seven stations on the 19-minute run. The unlit tunnel reeked of coal gas. It was not only smoky but also foggy that morning. “Unusually murky,” was how one flagman described it. Outside, it was snowing. “It was just the kind of weather that would make smoke or vapor hang in the air a long time without being shattered,” Thomas F. Freel, an acting battalion chief of the city’s fire department, later recalled.

  A crew member would testify that No. 118 was proceeding at a robust 20 mph, but a railroad official who was on the train later estimated that it was speeding through the tunnel at up to 35 mph. By this point, the train was five minutes late. Whether Wisker saw the green cautionary light (this was before green meant go), a flare, red lanterns, and other warning signals and simply ignored them was never definitively determined by railroad officials or by a grand jury. He insisted that he did not, nor did he hear the fireman’s cry of “Green,” although according to one version Wisker applied a brake at the last moment. When he saw the red light at 58th Street, where the mouth of the tunnel yawned into a vast open-air train yard two cross-town blocks wide and below street level, it was too late. One news reporter interviewed Wisker before his arrest and wrote, “The only explanation he can give is that he was trying to make up lost time.” Wisker, a news report concluded, “was sober, but he was both ambitious and impatient of delay.”

  What is known for sure is that at exactly 8:20, without warning and despite the heroic efforts of a brakeman, Train 118 slammed into the rear car of a Danbury commuter train parked on the same track. The Danbury express was awaiting a signal that yard work had been completed so it could proceed to Grand Central, where it had been due at 8:17. Fifteen passengers, among the 60 who boarded in the last car at the New Rochelle station, were killed instantly. Most were crushed to death by the telescoping engine or scalded in a horrific mass of twisted wreckage, mangled limbs, and sputtering steam that remains Manhattan’s worst railroad accident.

  The last bodies were not removed for more than 10 hours. “The hissing steam and smoke made it seem that I was going to be cooked alive,” said Richard H. Mollineux, 23, who fractured his right thigh and was among the 36 passengers injured. Two of these died within a week. Among the dead were Amanda F. Howard, who had been married only six months and worked at Standard Oil; Theodore Fajardo, a Spanish-born buyer for a Cuban importing firm, who left a widow and four young children; and Oscar Meyrowitz, general manager of E.B. Meyrowitz Opticians, established by his brother, Emil. “As slowly the harvest of death reaped in the hole under the New York streets is being garnered in the homes of New Rochelle,” the New York Times reported, “the townsmen of the dead and the maimed are beginning to ask each other not how this thing occurred, but why.”

  IMAGINE NAVIGATING THE PARK AVENUE TUNNEL WHEN IT WAS CHOKED WITH SMOKE AND SOOT FROM STEAM LOCOMOTIVES.

  J.H. Franklin, the manager of Grand Central, singled out John Wisker for blame. But the Reverend J.E. Lovejoy of the Mott Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, in his sermon the following Sunday, defended Wisker, his devout parishioner, and pointed fingers elsewhere. “It is easy to convict a poor man of almost any crime, but it is almost impossible to prosecute the rich man, who with haughty insolence jingles his dollars in his pockets and pulls powerful influences his way.” A coroner’s inquest lodged no formal charges, but a special state commission delivered a stinging rebuke to the railroad for gross negligence “in putting an engineer of such limited experience and unascertained capacity” at the controls of a passenger train at rush hour. No railroad officials were charged, however. Wisker was indicted for second-degree manslaughter because he “unmistakably violated the well-known rule which, under the conditions surrounding him, required him to stop his train.”

  THE CRASH OCCURRED AT 56TH STREET, not far from the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue. Cornelius Vanderbilt III and Alfred Vanderbilt, great-grandsons of the Commodore, rushed to the scene in time to learn that Wisker had been arrested by the New York City police pending a coroner’s inquest. Almost on the spot, they joined other railroad officials, including William J. Wilgus, the New York Central’s chief engineer, in a decision that would change the face of New York. Given the state railway commission’s subsequent findings, the grand jury’s decision not to prosecute the railroad’s chief executives this time was simply too close for comfort. “It was not enough that the New York Central Railroad had been maintaining for many years a defective signal system and that any day a serious accident might happen as a result of the maintenance of such a system,” said William Travers Jerome, the district attorney (he was a nephew of Leonard Jerome, who had been Cornelius Vanderbilt’s stockbroker), “but it must have been found affirmatively, and beyond reasonable doubt, that this particular accident, with the ensuing deaths, occurred as the direct result of its defective system.” The next time, a grand jury might do just that.

  Even with the recent renovations, Grand Central Station, which was already outmoded the day it opened a generation earlier, would have to be razed. The rails would have to be electrified. The goat pastures and shanties that still dotted mid-Manhattan would be replaced by a colossal Grand Central Terminal. It would be a majestic gateway to the nation’s greatest city, the catalyst for a new Midtown flanking a breathtakingly luxuriant boulevard, and a prototype for innovative transportation and urban planning imperatives a
cross the country.

  In short, the new Grand Central Terminal was built, in a way, by accident.

  TERMINAL CONNOTES AN ENDING. For a century, Grand Central has been anything but. This book is Grand Central’s biography. Nobody who has been there, no one who has witnessed the intricate choreography on the Main Concourse or eavesdropped on the crowd’s collective voice, could doubt that a building, a supposedly quiescent pile of marble and stone, could embody a living organism. The terminal is the throbbing heart of a city. “As the earth cooled,” Colson Whitehead wrote in The Colossus of New York, “Grand Central bubbled up through miles of magma, lodged in the crust of this island, settled here. The first immigrant. Still unassimilated. Ever indigestible. The river of skyscrapers flows around it. Travelers swim to it and cling, savoring solid handhold in roaring whitewater. Churches full up at regular intervals on a schedule laid out in the business plan. Like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge.”

  The story of Grand Central mirrors the story of urban America.

  It is a story that reveals the secrets of hidden staircases, mysterious underground vaults, a publicity-shy owner, and a secluded platform reserved for the president of the United States. It is a story about people, from Bryan Henry, a Metro-North cop who befriended the homeless, to Audrey Johnson, who fields customers’ questions in the information booth, to Jacqueline Onassis, whose devotion to historic preservation saved the terminal from certain destruction.

  Grand Central has been the wellspring of new beginnings for millions of people who arrived in New York to fulfill their dreams, heeded the siren call to go west, and returned lovesick to their hometowns. Unlike a station, a terminal conjures up a destination, not merely a place to pass through. Grand Central embodied that role, as the gateway to New York since 1913 and as the city’s Gateway to a Continent. Between 1913 and the centennial of the New York Central in 1926, the number of passengers served annually by the terminal nearly doubled, to 43 million from 23 million. Today, the number is verging on a record, headed, for the first time, toward the 100 million passengers a year forecast when the terminal first opened a century ago.