Grand Central

by Sam Roberts

On Saturday night, April 6, 1991, Amtrak did just that (unless you count Westchester and Connecticut as the rest of America). The stainless-steel Maple Leaf left for Toronto, hauling an antique private car, the Black Diamond, which 16 railroad buffs had rented to mark the occasion and to lament the loss, as one put it, of “the charm, the mystery and the mystique” of Grand Central. The head steward aboard was Jesse Mitchell, 73, who had been a porter on the 20th Century Limited and had whistle-stopped with three presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Jimmy Carter. Grand Central’s last long-distance train left at 8:35 p.m., the Rip Van Winkle, bound for Albany. The engineer, Jim Sweeney, waved a hand-lettered sign that read, “Last Amtrak Train Out of Grand Central Station.” Overnight, the Gateway to a Continent devolved into a gateway to six counties in two states.

  Still, even in its heyday, Grand Central sent not only trains across the country, but trends, too.

  A STYLIZED VERSION OF THE FAMOUS OPALESCENT GLASS CLOCK IS THE LOGO FOR THE TERMINAL’S CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. THE CLOCK WAS REPAIRED IN 1954.

  GATEWAY TO A CONTINENT

  MODERN TIME BEGAN AT GRAND CENTRAL. Unlike any other depot in the world—even busier ones—the terminal became synonymous with a bustling urban ballet. The proverbial wisecrack “What is this, Grand Central Station?” in confronting any jam-packed place became a universal metaphor for frenzy. The metaphor was even invoked in the Warren Commission report on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. An FBI agent, describing the chaotic crush of newsmen at police headquarters in Dallas, observed that conditions were “not too much unlike Grand Central Station at rush hour.”

  While popularizing the red carpet treatment on the Century, the terminal’s very name conjured up an egalitarian elegance, this magnificent hub where subway riders, suburban commuters, the famous and the infamous, first-class travelers and itinerant gawkers, might mingle. Perhaps more than any other public space, the terminal not only evolved into a household name, but also exercised a profound influence on American culture. Grand Central inspired song lyrics, a popular radio program, memorable movie scenes, literary works, television and theatrical performances, the civil rights movement, new visions of architecture for transportation, including airline terminals, the City Beautiful school of urban planning, the enormously profitable monetization of the empty space above private property, and the sometimes conflicting principle of historic preservation. All while whisking hundreds of thousands of people daily to and from their destinations.

  GRAND CENTRAL, its predecessors on 42nd Street and its famous trains, emerged early on as a cultural touchstone emblematic of New York’s magnetic glamour. One way a generation of Americans heard about it was through the popular radio soap opera on NBC Grand Central Station, which was broadcast nationally from 1937 to 1953. “To those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program,” Joan Didion wrote, “where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (‘Money,’ and ‘High Fashion.’ And ‘The Hucksters’). New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.” Episodes in the dramatic radio anthology shared an exhilarating prologue: each began in Grand Central, with the announcer (George Baxter, Ken Roberts, or Tom Shirley) intoning,

  As a bullet seeks its target, shining rails in every part of our great country are aimed at Grand Central Station, heart of the nation’s greatest city. Drawn by the magnetic force of the fantastic metropolis, day and night great trains rush toward the Hudson River, sweep down its eastern bank for 140 miles, flash briefly by the long red row of tenement houses south of 125th Street, dive with a roar into the two-and-one-half-mile tunnel which burrows beneath the glitter and swank of Park Avenue, and then… Grand Central Station! Crossroads of a million private lives! Gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily!

  The producers indulged in some poetic license. Sound effects for the show included the whoosh and chug of steam locomotives, which had been banned at Grand Central for more than three decades.

  WHAT’S SO STRIKING is the range of movies in which Grand Central is cast as itself. The reason is that it is so recognizable, so suggestive of comings and goings simply by a familiar arch or signage. “In such details resides Grand Central’s power as an almost universally recognizable ‘place,’ even as it offers a superb springboard for fantasy,” James Sanders wrote in Celluloid Skyline. “How many other structures could be so universally identified by a few fragments of their graphics?”

  “Nice city,” says actor Percy Kilbride as he enters the Main Concourse in the 1950 film Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town. To which daughter Kettle replies, “Pa, this is the station.”

  The movies captured the impressive grandeur of Grand Central. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 psychological thriller Spellbound, Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck kiss and make their getaway from Grand Central, where Bergman tells the amnesiac Peck to free-associate when the clerk asks for their destination. He requests two tickets to Rome. She explains that he means Rome, Georgia. Overheard, they avoid police by taking a train to Rochester, New York, instead, where her mentor (played by Michael Chekhov) opines, “Women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients.”

  “In the montage that opens ‘North by Northwest,’ ” James Sanders writes, “we see waves of New Yorkers rushing through the great room—some on their way to trains and subways, others simply passing through, enjoying a covered shortcut from one part of Midtown to another. No wonder that later in the film, Cary Grant—an innocent man now become a fugitive—looks to the concourse and its throngs to provide the anonymity he desperately needs.” In the 1959 film, Grant and Eva Marie Saint banter on the 20th Century Limited:

  EVE KENDALL: I tipped the steward five dollars to seat you here if you should come in.

  ROGER THORNHILL: Is that a proposition?

  EVE: I never discuss love on an empty stomach.

  ROGER: You’ve already eaten!

  EVE: But you haven’t.

  (An original script by Ernest Lehman had Eve saying “I never make love…,” but it was dubbed to satisfy the censors.)

  “Tell me,” Roger asks his tablemate, “what do you do besides lure men to their doom on the Twentieth Century Limited?” And just before they escape their pursuers, Roger says, “If we ever get out of this alive, let’s go back to New York on the train together, all right?”

  EVE: Is that a proposition?

  ROGER: It’s a proposal, sweetie.

  The Century figures in Bing Crosby’s 1933 film Going Hollywood, in which, playing a Broadway star, Crosby gets a star-studded send-off complete with dancing porters, chorus girls, and a scrum of flashbulb-blinking photographers at Track 27. In what amounts to the round trip begun in Going Hollywood, two decades later Fred Astaire stars in The Band Wagon as a faded movie star who comes back to New York to lose himself “all alone in a crowd.” By the time he dances up the Track 34 platform, though, he regains his confidence—reminding viewers that simply entering Grand Central is exhilarating and that the terminal is a place of new beginnings as much as endings.

  Grand Central also is cast in cameos or starring roles in Grand Central Murder, The Cotton Club, Men in Black II, The Prince of Tides, The Freshman, The House on Carroll Street, One Fine Day, The French Connection, and Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. In Carlito’s Way, a chase scene climaxes in a shootout during an interminable ride on the Grand Central escalators, which actually whisk pedestrians to and from the Met Life Building at 120 feet per second.

  In The Fisher King, the chaotic tango of the crowd is transformed into a rhythmic gambol. “When Robin Williams, as a pure-hearted, emotionally unbalanced man, spots the quite plain woman of his dreams heading for her train,” Caryn James wrote in the Times, “suddenly everyone in the room breaks into a waltz, as this g
rim, everyday place becomes a scene of glittering romance.” In Midnight Run, the terminal is where bounty hunter Robert DeNiro departs with his quarry, Charles Grodin, because Grodin is afraid of flying. In Superman, Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor manages his evil empire from the bowels of Grand Central. Lex boasts of his Park Avenue address, to which his floozy secretary replies: “Park Avenue address? Two hundred feet below?” (In the new ABC series 666 Park, the address is mythical, but apartment-dwellers may find the real estate machinations plausibly demonic.)

  Even so, Grand Central projected the image of a more welcoming venue than the much-mourned Penn Station, which is why, Sanders wrote, the director Rouben Mamoulian chose Penn Station in his 1929 film Applause for an intimidating arrival of a vulnerable newcomer. “Compared to this place, Grand Central’s concourse seems friendly, even relaxed,” Sanders wrote. “This is simply overwhelming.”

  Brian Selznick photographed Grand Central and its secret compartments before he wrote The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which inspired the film Hugo. “Fantasy and reality mixed together to make the station in my book,” Selznick said, “but it was dreaming of Grand Central that got much of it started.”

  A grand building also makes for a grand ruin. In Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the terminal plays itself as an ancient temple in post-apocalyptic New York. In Armageddon, dazzling special effects depict asteroids crashing into Grand Central. In Revolutionary Road, Leonardo DiCaprio commutes to Grand Central to work on his 30th birthday, his bobbing head indistinguishable from those of scores of other faceless men tethered to dispiriting work by their white collars. In Madagascar, Melman, the neurotic giraffe, gets his head stuck in the information booth clock as animators created their own version of Grand Central from original blueprints and photographic essays. “It’s such an icon,” said Eric Darnell, one of the directors. “Even people who’ve never been to New York City know about Grand Central Station.”

  BEN HECHT AND CHARLES MACARTHUR’S 1932 farce Twentieth Century took place at Grand Central and on the famous train (it was adapted in 1978 as a musical, On the Twentieth Century). It was from Grand Central that Biff Loman embarked on his fateful visit to his father in Boston in Death of a Salesman, and where Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye stashed his belongings in a coin-operated locker, slept on an oak bench in the waiting room, and crossed the street to the Biltmore. While waiting to meet a date under the clock there, Caulfield engaged in some urban sightseeing (“Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls,” J.D. Salinger wrote).

  Honking all the way through horrendous traffic, Grand Central is where Bill the driver delivers Tom and his mother in Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s children’s classic, The Taxi That Hurried. Grand Central is where Tom Rath, the hero of Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, stops to buy a clean white handkerchief and get his shoes shined, and where he sees “the dim figures of tired-appearing men in overalls occasionally illuminated by naked electric-light bulbs” as his train wends its way through the “dark caverns” under Park Avenue en route to Westport and his home on Greentree Avenue. As he walked through Grand Central one morning, “he looked up and for the first time in years noticed the stars painted on the blue ceiling there. They seemed to be shining brightly, and feeling slightly theatrical, he wondered if it were legitimate to wish on a painted star. He decided it would be all right to make a phony wish, so he wished he could make a million dollars and add a new wing to his grandmother’s house, with a billiard room and a conservatory in which to grow orchids.”

  Grand Central was magical, its ramps calibrated to slope at precisely the most accessible angle, its platforms holding the promise of unfulfilled journeys and the proverbial light at the end of a tunnel. In 1950, Jack Finney, who later wrote the classic New York tale Time and Again, discovered a phantasmagorical third underground level of Grand Central in his short story of the same name that leads him back to 1894 and depot days.

  The presidents of the New York Central and the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads will swear on a stack of timetables that there are only two. But I say there are three, because I’ve been on the third level at Grand Central Station. Yes, I’ve taken the obvious step: I talked to a psychiatrist friend of mine, among others. I told him about the third level at Grand Central Station, and he said it was a waking-dream wish fulfillment. He said I was unhappy. That made my wife kind of mad, but he explained that he meant the modern world is full of insecurity, fear, war, worry, and all the rest of it, and that I just want to escape. Well, hell, who doesn’t? Everybody I know wants to escape, but they don’t wander down into any third level at Grand Central Station.

  Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots. There’s probably a long tunnel that nobody knows about feeling its way under the city right now, on its way to Times Square, and maybe another to Central Park. And maybe—because for so many people through the years Grand Central has been an exit, a way of escape—maybe that’s how the tunnel I got into… but I never told my psychiatrist friend about that idea.

  Its sheer breadth makes Grand Central a universal metaphor. Sybille Bedford opens her A Visit to Don Otavio in New York where “the upper part of Grand Central Station is large and splendid like the Baths of Caracalla.” The “mole people” who lived in a steamy “weedlot of steel” beneath the terminal figured in Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness. A Hungarian doctoral student who conducted research on the national symbols of suburban America concluded, “The Grand Central Terminal of New York is almost always the goal of traveling.” And in novels, the movies, and even nonfiction, Grand Central has been a ubiquitous symbol for the commuter. In her book on shopping, the sociology professor Sharon Zukin draws on portrayals by journalist William H. Whyte, sociologist C. Wright Mills, and novelist John Cheever to invoke the corporate manager who “commuted home to the northern suburbs every evening on the 6:24 from Grand Central. The club car was filled with guys like these, loosening their ties and drinking gin and tonic, before they toddled home to their wives and children.”

  Cheever worked at home in Ossining and did not commute to Manhattan. But he knew Grand Central intimately because it was a real-life stage on which so many of his characters appeared and disappeared. He began his short story “Reunion” with this invitation to the reader: “The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central Station,” and another story unfolded on the train in “The Five-Forty-Eight.” In “O City of Broken Dreams,” Cheever wrote of a family visiting Manhattan for the first time: “Alice noticed that the paving, deep in the station, had a frosty glitter, and she wondered if diamonds had been ground into the concrete.”

  Cheever’s daughter, Susan, recalled that as her father grew older and became disoriented, the barely controlled chaos of the terminal terrified him, and even earlier, the terminal had morphed into a metaphor for beginnings and endings. She once wrote of her father that there “was something that would always lead him away and not only away but far away so that when he stepped from Grand Central into the traffic of 42nd Street and only then did he feel that he was free.” “And at 3 a.m. I seemed to be walking through Grand Central Station,” he wrote in 1956. “And the latch on my suitcase gives, spilling onto the floor the contents of my life.”

  The terminal figures in Mark Helprin’s lush Winter’s Tale, in which the protagonist, Peter Lake, secretes himself in a small compartment above the cerulean ceiling. (“What caused you to look up? No one else ever does,” he demands of an intruder. “I don’t know. When I saw the stars were on, I couldn’t take my eyes from them.”) A memoir by Elliot Vestner Jr., a retired lawyer, was titled Meet Me Under the Clock at Grand Central because in 1924 his parents, like so many other couples and potential partners, met on a date at that magical place (their second choice probably would have been across the street under the clock at the Bilt
more Hotel).

  “YOU SHOULD LIVE SO LONG,” WAS ONE ANSWER TO THE PROVERBIAL QUESTION, “WHEN DOES THE LAST TRAIN LEAVE?”

  In “Report on ‘Grand Central Terminal,’ ” a short science fiction story by Leo Szilard, a Hungarian émigré physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb, researchers from another planet explore Manhattan after a neutron bomb destroyed all life. Their conflicting interpretations of what life was like climax as they investigate earthly artifacts in Grand Central. “What its name ‘Grand Central Terminal’ meant we do not know,” the narrator acknowledges, “but there is little doubt as to the general purpose which this building served. It was part of a primitive transportation system based on clumsy engines which ran on rails and dragged cars mounted on wheels behind them.”

  Good guess, but the scientists are largely baffled trying to come to grips with the reasons behind pay toilets and the disks that must be deposited to enter them. One researcher concludes that “a system of production and distribution of goods based on a system of exchanging disks cannot be stable, but is necessarily subject to fluctuations vaguely reminiscent of the manic-depressive cycle in the insane.” The narrator demurs, revealing that a spot check of lodging houses found no “depositories” equipped with “a gadget containing disks” and suggests that they are associated with a ceremonial act “connected with the act of deposition in public places, and in public places only.” Never had so much profundity been expended on a restroom.

  GRAND CENTRAL HAS BEEN A SHOWCASE for what the architects of its restoration pronounced “a fascinating fabric of cultural history.” The North Balcony lured so many travelers seeking serenity and contemplation and “itinerant sophists” that it was dubbed the “Philosophers’ Gallery.” A prototype of the DeWitt Clinton locomotive was exhibited on the East Balcony, and in 1929 the Bremen, an all-metal monoplane with a 58-foot wingspan, the first to fly westward across the Atlantic, was suspended over it. Grand Central is the nation’s living room and town square. The Main Concourse and Waiting Room could accommodate 30,000 people. A report completed in 1991 by Beyer Blinder Belle, architects of the restoration master plan, declared the concourse “the central hall, the lungs of the terminal, a place of public assembly without parallel in New York City.” If the concourse evoked the broad aisle of a cathedral, it was fitting that in 1931 Episcopal Bishop William Manning launched a campaign from the North Balcony to raise $10 million to complete the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; a one-ton model was installed as a preview of the Gothic Revival structure rising uptown on Morningside Heights.