by Sam Roberts
The Times admitted that “in describing it, the superlative degree must be kept in constant use.” It would be the biggest, it would contain the most trackage, and, on top of that, it would be self-supporting.
Once the method of motive power was agreed upon, Wilgus’s second challenge was how to build a terminal without inconveniencing the passengers on the railroad’s hundreds of daily long-haul and commuter trains. To meet the challenge, the railroad temporarily relocated some of the station’s functions to the nearby Grand Central Palace Hotel. Again Wilgus devised an ingenious construction strategy. The arduous process of demolishing existing structures, excavating rock and dirt 90 feet deep for the bilevel platforms and utilities, razing the mammoth train shed, and building the new terminal would proceed in longitudinal “bites,” as he called them—troughs bored through the middle of Manhattan, one section at a time and proceeding from east to west. Construction would take fully 10 years, and by the time it was barely halfway finished, Wilgus would be gone and his guesstimate of the cost of the project would have doubled to about $2 billion in today’s dollars.
JOHN WISKER, the man whose train accident in the Park Avenue Tunnel triggered the construction of Grand Central Terminal, did not live to see it completed. While no railroad officials were prosecuted, the accident sparked 30 lawsuits against the Central. One resulted in a record $60,000 jury verdict for the victim’s widow (about $1.5 million in current dollars). Another verdict won by a Bronx stenographer, $1,250 for personal injuries, was tossed out by a judge who concluded that the “victim” quite possibly had not been a passenger on either train.
At Wisker’s manslaughter trial, he was represented by Frank Moss (a dogged investigator who once provoked Richard Croker, the Tammany boss, to admit, “I am working for my pocket all the time, just like you, Mr. Moss”). On April 24, 1903, less than three months before ground was broken for the new Grand Central, the Manhattan jury delivered its verdict after only two hours of deliberations.
Wisker stood pale and trembling, according to contemporary accounts, “a shadow of the sturdy fellow who was arrested the day of the fatal collision.” He collapsed into his seat and cried when the foreman pronounced him not guilty. Wisker was, apparently, accident-prone, though. Seven years later, operating a hoist for a coal company on the West Side, he fell into the Hudson River and drowned.
AS CONSTRUCTION ON THE TERMINAL progressed, the New York Central was keeping one very wary eye on what was happening just across town. Its archrival, the Pennsylvania Railroad, was challenging the Central’s monopoly by finally providing direct service to Manhattan. The Central and the Pennsy were like Coke and Pepsi, perennial rivals for routes, passengers, and market share. The Pennsylvania was older (by name, at least) and bigger (by cargo tons carried), but the Central more than matched it in ego and glitz, as befitted their two home states. The Pennsylvania’s keystone logo evoked the keystone state. The Central’s was a distinctive, but not evocative oval. New York was in the name. Anything else was superfluous,
In the 19th century, the Pennsylvania was an also-ran in New York City. Without a Midtown station, passengers had to be ferried between Exchange Place in Jersey City and Manhattan by boat. Building a bridge across the river would have required a joint project with other Jersey railroads, but none was game. Electrification, though, would make a Hudson River tunnel feasible. On December 12, 1901, a little less than a month before the Park Avenue Tunnel crash, Alexander Cassatt, the Pennsylvania’s president, announced that the railroad would bore under the river and run trains to a grand station of its own to be built on two square blocks bounded by 31st and 33rd Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
PENN STATION CHALLENGED THE NEW YORK CENTRAL’S MANHATTAN MONOPOLY.
Ground was broken on May 1, 1904, for McKim, Mead & White’s colossal gateway. The breathtaking pink-granite-colonnaded station—a “great Doric temple to transportation,” the historian Jill Jonnes called it—was modeled on the public baths built in Rome 1,700 years earlier by Emperor Caracalla. It spanned seven acres and sat astride the tracks that continued under the East River to connect with the Long Island Rail Road and the Pennsylvania’s Sunnyside Yards in Queens. The station would open in 1910 and, with the expense of the two sets of tunnels, cost $114 million, or about $2.7 billion in today’s dollars. And if, by some measures, it was a bigger station than the proposed Grand Central, the New York Central’s publicity department wasted no time in pronouncing its new depot the biggest terminal in the world. Despite its stark grandeur of girders and glass, Penn Station would never become the catalyst for planned development that Grand Central did.
WILLIAM WILGUS WAS AN ENGINEER, not an architect, but he hoped to impose his own aesthetic on the new terminal. He knew what he didn’t like about the old depot: its “unattractive architectural design” and its “unfortunate exterior color treatment,” as well as the “great blunder” of dividing the city for 14 blocks and by obstructing Fourth Avenue. Once he persuaded the Vanderbilts and the Central’s other directors to accept his bold vision, they were intent on not repeating earlier mistakes, which had cost not only money, but goodwill as well.
CONSTRUCTION OF THE TERMINAL TOOK 10 YEARS. MORE THAN 150,000 PEOPLE SHOWED UP FOR THE OFFICIAL OPENING ON FEBRUARY 2, 1913.
In 1903, the Central invited the nation’s leading architects to submit designs for the new terminal. Samuel Huckel Jr. went for baroque, a turreted confection with Park Avenue slicing through it. McKim, Mead & White proposed a 60-story skyscraper—the world’s tallest—atop the terminal (a modified version was later incorporated into the firm’s design for the 26-story Municipal Building, completed in 1916), itself topped by a dramatic 300-foot jet of steam illuminated in red as a beacon for ships and an advertisement (if, even then, an anachronistic one) for the railroad.
Reed & Stem, a St. Paul firm (the name evoked landscape architects), won the competition. (Its successor, WASA/Studio A, still operates in New York City.) The firm began with two big advantages. It had designed other stations for the New York Central. Moreover, like the Central itself, Reed & Stem could count on connections: Allen H. Stem was Wilgus’s brother-in-law. Yet in the highly charged world of real estate development in New York, another firm’s connections trumped Reed & Stem’s. After the selection was announced, Warren & Wetmore, who were architects of the New York Yacht Club and who boasted society connections, submitted an alternative design. It didn’t hurt that Whitney Warren was William Vanderbilt’s cousin.
The Central’s chairman officiated at a shotgun marriage of the two firms, pronouncing them the Associated Architects of Grand Central Terminal. The partnership would be fraught with dissension, design changes, and acrimony and would climax two decades later in a spectacular lawsuit and an appropriately monumental settlement. In 1921, a referee found that Warren’s accounting was “improper and erroneous” and awarded Stem, the surviving partner, the fantastic sum of $223,891.16—in effect validating Warren’s maxim that “the standard of success in this country is the making of money, therefore, the architect should make money and be considered successful.”
To Wilgus’s dismay, the Warren & Wetmore version eliminated the revenue-generating office and hotel tower atop the terminal. It also scrapped the vehicular viaducts that would remedy the obstruction of Fourth Avenue created by the depot. (Some aspects of the original Reed & Stem design would later be restored.) But by any measure, the new terminal would justify its name. It would be grand.
Once the design was agreed upon, building Grand Central was a gargantuan undertaking. Wheezing steam shovels excavated nearly 3.2 million cubic yards of earth and rock to an average depth of 45 feet to accommodate the subterranean train yards, bilevel platforms, and utilities—some as deep as 10 stories. The daily detritus, coupled with debris from the demolition of the old station, amounted to 1,000 cubic yards and filled nearly 300 railway dump cars. The lower tracks were 40 feet below street level and sprouted “a submerged forest” of steel girders. Co
nstruction required 118,597 tons of steel to create the superstructure and 33 miles of track. At peak construction periods, 10,000 workers were assigned to the site and work progressed around the clock. Beneath the 770-foot-wide valley he created in Midtown Manhattan, Wilgus dug a six-foot-diameter drainage sewer about 65 feet deep that ran a half mile to the East River.
THE CENTRAL NOT ONLY MET the state’s deadline to electrify the line in Manhattan, but did so two years early. The route was electrified for 17 miles, north to Wakefield and Kingsbridge in the Bronx. The first electric locomotive barreled through the Park Avenue Tunnel from High Bridge on September 30, 1906. Thirty-five 2,200-horsepower electric locomotives could accelerate to 40 mph; multiple-unit suburban trains could hit 52 mph. The Vanderbilts and the New York Central were immensely proud of their all-electric terminal and their mostly electric railroad. The maze of tracks and trains was commanded from a four-story switch-and-signal tower below 50th Street. On one floor was a machine with 400 levers, the largest ever constructed, to sort out the suburban trains. On the floor above, another machine with 362 levers controlled the express tracks. A worker was assigned to each battery of 40 levers, and tiny bulbs on a facsimile of the train yard would automatically be extinguished as a train passed a switch and illuminated again when it reached the next switch.
THE COMPLETED TERMINAL WAS ORIGINALLY A SOLITARY PRESENCE ON EAST 42ND STREET, BUT NOT FOR LONG. DEVELOPMENT SPREAD EAST.
On June 5, 1910, the Owl, as the midnight train was known, left Grand Central Station for Boston. It was the last to depart from the old depot, which handled an impressive 100 trains a day when it opened but was incapable of servicing the hundreds of trains that arrived and departed daily four decades later. Demolition began immediately. The old station and yards spanned a little more than 23 acres. The new one covered more than twice that area. The station had a capacity of 366 railway cars. The new terminal could accommodate 1,053. The old depot handled 9,000 suitcases and trunks a day. The new one could handle 16,000 pieces of luggage.
WHILE PENNSYLVANIA STATION opened earlier and to rave reviews, it could not compare to Grand Central in magnitude. Penn Station and its yards spanned 28 acres. Grand Central covered 70. Penn Station had 16 miles of rails that converged into 21 tracks serving 11 platforms. The comparable figures for Grand Central originally were 32 miles, 46 tracks, and 30 platforms. Grand Central required twice as much masonry and nearly twice the steel that Penn Station did. Fifteen hundred columns were installed to support the street-level deck and the buildings that would rise on it. Another $800,000 was spent on steel reinforcement, not needed for the terminal itself, but to support a skyscraper that eventually might rise above it. The terminal alone cost $43 million to build, the equivalent of about $1 billion today, and the entire project set the Central back about $80 million.
Passengers’ comfort was of paramount concern. When it was finally completed, Grand Central could boast a separate women’s waiting room with oak floors and wainscoting and maids at the ready; a ladies’ shoe-polishing room “out of sight of the rubbernecks” and staffed by “colored girls in neat blue liveries”; a telephone room for making calls; a salon gussied up with walls and ceilings of Carrara glass, “where none but her own sex will see while she has her hair dressed”; a dressing room attended by a maid (at 25 cents); and a private barber shop for men, which could be rented for $1 an hour, and a public version where “the customer may elect to be shaved in anyone of 30 languages.”
No amenity was spared. “Timid travelers may ask questions with no fear of being rebuffed by hurrying trainmen, or imposed upon by hotel runners, chauffeurs, or others in blue uniforms,” a promotional brochure boasted. Instead, “walking encyclopedias” in gray frock coats and white caps were available. Passengers would be protected from unwanted contact as well as glances. “Special accommodations are to be provided for immigrants and gangs of laborers,” the Times reported. “They can be brought into the station and enter a separate room without meeting other travelers.” Grand Central, the brochure proclaimed, is “a place where one delights to loiter, admiring its beauty and symmetrical lines—a poem in stone.”
JUST HOW MUCH LOITERING could have been done on opening day is arguable. Railroad officials estimated that by 4 p.m. on Sunday, February 2, 1913, more than 150,000 people had visited the terminal since the doors were thrown open at midnight. The first train to leave was the Boston Express No. 2, at 12:01 a.m. The first to arrive was a local on the Harlem line. F.M. Lahm of Yonkers bought the first ticket.
Grand Central was billed as the first great “stairless” station, one in which the flow of passengers was sped by gently sloping ramps that were tested out at various grades and ultimately designed to accommodate everyone from “the old, infirm traveler, to the little tot toddling along at his mother’s side, to the man laden down with baggage which he declines to relinquish to any one of the most cordial attendants, to the women trailing a long and preposterous train.” (Ramp—the very word was obscure, prompting Munsey’s magazine to explain to readers that Julius Caesar had built a long sloping earthworks to the ramparts when he laid siege to a city.) The flow would now empty from 32 Upper Level and 17 Lower Level platforms (fed from as many as 66 and 57 tracks, respectively) into a Main Concourse that was 275 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 125 feet high (spreading nearly 38,000 square feet) and flanked by 90-foot-high transparent walls that were punctuated by glass walkways connecting the terminal’s corner offices.
THE OYSTER BAR, HERE AROUND 1913, IS THE TERMINAL’S OLDEST TENANT. IT SELLS SOME 5 MILLION BIVALVES ANNUALLY AND RETAINS ITS ELEGANCE.
Its concave ceiling created a view of the heavens from Aquarius to Cancer in an October sky, 2,500 stars—59 of them illuminated and intersected by two broad golden bands representing the ecliptic and the equator. For several months, painters debated how to squeeze the heavens onto a cylindrical ceiling because the artist Paul Helleu’s version seemed more fitting for a dome and experimented to find just the proper shade of blue. (Helleu was no stranger to the Vanderbilts. Proceeds from his wildly popular 1901 sketch of Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American-born duchess of Marlborough and William K.’s daughter, had helped support his extravagant Belle Epoque lifestyle.)
The ceiling designs were developed by J. Monroe Hewlett and executed largely by Charles Basing and his associates. As many as 50 painters under Basing’s direction worked simultaneously to ensure that there was no differentiation in color tone. Lunette windows were ornamented with plaster reliefs of winged locomotive wheels, branches of foliage symbolizing transportation, and clouds and a caduceus (the short staff usually entwined with serpents and surrounded by wings and typically carried by heralds).
The finishing touches would not be complete for another year (the viaduct would not be opened until 1919 and the innovative Lower Level loop, which allowed arriving trains to depart more quickly, would not become operational until 1927). Among the last was the gigantic sculpture designed by a Frenchman, Jules Félix Coutan, above the central portal on 42nd Street. Coutan, who also designed the France of the Renaissance sculpture for the extravagant Alexander III bridge in Paris, created a one-fourth-size plaster model in his studio from which John Donnelly, a native of Ireland, carved the final 1,500-ton version from Indiana limestone at the William Bradley & Son yards in Long Island City, Queens. (Donnelly also worked on Riverside Church and the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan and the Supreme Court Building in Washington.)
The railroad described Transportation, the 60-foot-wide, 50-foot-tall sculpture, considered at the time the world’s largest sculptured group, as representing “Progress, Mental and Physical Force,” with Hercules embodying physical strength, the reclining Minerva wisdom and the arts, and Mercury, wearing a winged helmet and protected by a vigilant American eagle, science and commerce as the messenger of the gods. (Some second-guessers say Hercules is really Vulcan, the blacksmith, holding a hammer and emblematic of the iron horse. Also, while Whitney Warren interpreted the trio a
s mental and moral energy supporting the glory of commerce, a Metro-North guidebook demythologized the impact and attributed it to mental and mortal energy.)
“The three were meant to symbolize the grandeur of the Vanderbilts’ New York Central Railroad, but surely these are the tutelary deities of all Manhattan, the city of the unquenchable entrepreneurial flame,” the architectural historian Francis Morrone wrote. “As the historian Paul Johnson reminds us… so-called robber barons such as the Vanderbilts, ruthless though they undoubtedly were, not only left magnificent monuments in their wake but also created the vast national enterprises into which the teeming multitudes of immigrants were absorbed and uplifted by the engine of prosperity. To deny that this is what New York, in its essence, is about is to posit a fantasy city.”
Contemplating a plaster model of the sculpture in his office, Warren later wrote that while the ancients entered cities through triumphal gates that punctuated mighty fortifications, in New York and other cities the gateway is more likely to be “a tunnel which discharges the human flow in the very center of the town. Such is the Grand Central Terminal and the motive of its façade is an attempt to offer a tribute to the glory of commerce as exemplified by that institution.”
THE FAÇADE WAS HAILED FOR THE LARGEST SCULPTURAL GROUPING IN THE WORLD AND THE BIGGEST DISPLAY OF TIFFANY GLASS.
Mike Wallace, the coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, described the terminal’s construction as 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. The new Grand Central was imbued with the culture of connectivity. Not only did its expansion and electrification aim to boost the volume and velocity of passenger traffic, but it was a circulatory marvel.”