Grand Central

by Sam Roberts

  A year later, an estimated 5,000 well-wishers converged on the terminal to see off New York City Mayor James J. Walker on his way to Albany to face removal charges. (As he proceeded to the Ohio State Limited on Track 34, accompanied by his wife and her poodle, he encountered Joe Jacobs, the manager of Max Schmeling, who had lost his heavyweight title on a close decision to Jack Sharkey earlier that summer. “I hope they don’t hand me the same kind of a decision you got,” Walker quipped.) In 1934, 80,000 people turned out in a single day to inspect the Burlington Zephyr, a new speed king on the New York–to–Boston run. In 1912, 5,000 New Yorkers singing socialist anthems welcomed 100 children whose parents were striking the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and in 1941, 10,000 cheering Brooklyn Dodger fans jammed the Main Concourse to welcome their heroes home from Boston with their first National League pennant in 21 years. And later that year, a week after Pearl Harbor, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. inaugurated a drive to raise $10 billion in war bonds to prosecute the fight against Fascism. A 118-by-100-foot photomontage was installed depicting “What America Has to Defend and How It Will Defend It.” More than 3,000 people attended the unveiling of the mural. The ceremony was also broadcast on radio nationwide—“again locating Grand Central as a center of American culture,” as the restoration architects described it.

  During the war, thousands of servicemen were deployed from the terminal, which was bedecked with patriotic posters. In 1945, 1,000 people an hour—nearly 15,000 in all—filed through a special seven-car train promoting Victory Loan war bonds to view the original German and Japanese surrender documents.

  In 1952, an estimated 30,000 heard President Harry S. Truman speak from a Main Concourse balcony. (That same year, Walter Cronkite anchored the 1952 presidential election coverage from the fourth-floor studio.) In the early 1960s, thousands of spectators watched the CBS News screen above the New Haven’s ticket window to follow the space flights of Project Mercury, whose namesake reigned from the terminal’s façade. A spellbound crowd was glued to a video screen mapping Scott Carpenter’s progress orbiting the earth in his Aurora 7 capsule on May 24, 1962 (As the World Turns, the soap opera produced at the terminal’s CBS studio, was preempted).

  In 1971, hundreds of people queued up for two hours or more to place their wagers as the nation’s first off-track betting parlor opened at Grand Central (commuters were already used to a long wait; appropriate to the place, one advertisement proclaimed: “Nothing Brightens the Rat Race Like a Horse Race”). In 1973, John Gallin & Son installed what was billed as the city’s first automated teller machine at the Chase Manhattan branch beneath the 18-by-60-foot Kodak Colorama. The Rolling Stones bestowed their imprimatur on the terminal for a new generation when they announced their Steel Wheels world tour there in 1989, the same year that Ringo Starr, who played the pint-sized Mr. Conductor, introduced Thomas the Tank Engine on public television’s new Shining Time Station series there.

  “IN THE EVENT OF A CRISIS,” Ben Cheever wrote, “the big room behind and beneath the gods grows black with crowds.” Three thousand “yippies” from the Youth International Party celebrated spring in 1968 by staging a chaotic “yip-in” on the Main Concourse. They were dispersed by nightstick-swinging police officers after they hurled firecrackers and spun the hands off the information booth’s priceless, four-faced opalescent glass clock. (Another of its faces was later pierced by a bullet—apparently fired by a police officer in pursuit; that face is now at the Transit Museum.) More recently, Act Up and Occupy Wall Street have also staged demonstrations there.

  Grand Central became the shelter of last resort—a terminal in every sense—for the homeless, whose encampments dotted the yards and tunnels beneath the streets and the terminal’s public spaces. In Subways Are for Sleeping, Edmund G. Love wrote that Henry Shelby, a vagrant in 1953, would hunker down on the benches at Grand Central, where he could sleep prone and undisturbed for four hours between the regular police checks at 1:30 and 5:30 a.m. Shelby kept a ticket to Poughkeepsie in his pocket as insurance, so he could always claim he missed the last train. “On one occasion,” Love wrote, “a station policeman escorted him to a 6:30 train and made certain he got on it. Shelby got off at 125th Street and walked back to Grand Central.”

  THE MAIN CONCOURSE IS AMERICA’S LIVING ROOM. THOUSANDS GATHERED THERE IN 1962 TO WATCH JOHN GLENN’S SPACE FLIGHT.

  Some vagrants—when they were still quaintly called hoboes or tramps—had lived for years in subterranean dungeons beneath the Waldorf and other Park Avenue properties, in dank, rumbling, labyrinthine tunnels devoid of light except for the occasional naked incandescent bulb, but free from the interference, regulation, or danger associated with meddlesome public shelters.

  They cooked their food on hissing steam pipes stripped of their asbestos covers and they emerged from sordid and sooty sanctuaries during the day only to panhandle for bare essentials. (A fire that began in the subterranean tunnels under Grand Central shut the terminal down in 1985, but police said squatters living in a boxcar were not to blame.) Jennifer Toth, who gave them faces in her book The Mole People, recalled a man named Seville who was panhandling in Grand Central when a commuter gave him a bag containing a loaf of bread and a pound of baloney. He thanked the man, then shouted: “Pardon me, sir, would you happen to have some Grey Poupon?”

  By 1988, as Grand Central celebrated its 75th birthday, city officials estimated that as many as 500 homeless people were living in the terminal on any given night and that 50 or so had been encamped there for a year or more. “It’s a metaphor for New York in 1988 in a shrine of such beauty to have such misery,” said Robert M. Hayes, a lawyer who successfully sued the state in a right-to-shelter case and founded the Coalition for the Homeless.

  HOW GRAND CENTRAL DEALT with the challenge also provided an object lesson for the rest of America. Drop-in shelters were created to steer homeless people to permanent homes. Sometimes, officers were forced to eject aggressive panhandlers, a solution that proved temporary and invited fire from advocates for the homeless (as did the removal of benches from the waiting room). The Metropolitan Transportation Authority hired the Bowery Residents Committee to provide outreach services, and transit officials also worked in concert with the Grand Central Partnership, an amalgam of property owners in a 50-square-block area around the terminal.

  After Mobil Oil abandoned its East 42nd Street headquarters for suburban Virginia, those property owners convened an innovative self-taxing business improvement district in 1988 to spruce up the neighborhood and provide amenities that the city government could no longer afford. (Its 120 full-time employees, including 33 public-safety officers and 56 sanitation workers, and a nearly $13 million budget make it among the nation’s largest such districts. The annual surcharge on 204 properties was initially 10 cents per square foot, or what amounted to an extra 1 to 2 percent in real estate taxes; it ranged from more than $250,000 for the Metropolitan Life Building to $154 for a nearby delicatessen.)

  “The truth is,” the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote then, “that the Grand Central neighborhood does not work as it is now—it is too dirty, too pressured, too troubled by a large homeless population and too lacking in amenity for everyone else.” The partnership, he said approvingly, “is based on the idea that the terminal is not just a building, but the symbolic anchor of a neighborhood.” Through Daniel A. Biederman, its president (whom the partnership borrowed from the wildly successful Bryant Park Restoration behind the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue), and Peter L. Malkin, a lawyer and real estate investor whose office faced Grand Central (and whose father-in-law, Lawrence Wein, was once an owner of the Empire State Building), the business improvement district spawned similar public-private partnerships across the country. A subsidiary of the partnership transformed a nearby former parochial school into a center where hundreds of homeless people who congregated around Grand Central could be fed and could shower, receive counseling, and even stay overnight. “Enl
ightened self-interest and then some,” said Robert Hayes, the advocate for the homeless (although the partnership was later criticized when some outreach workers aggressively rousted vagrants in and near Grand Central).

  In New York City alone, 67 such business improvement districts invest $100 million collectively in public amenities. In addition to installing uniform signage and removing litter, the Grand Central Partnership raised more than $1.5 million to floodlight the terminal’s south and west façades. Since 1991, the terminal has been bathed in 136,000 watts of floodlight from buildings across the street. The blue and magenta tints were designed by Sylvan R. Shemitz, a lighting engineer whose goal, he said, was to make New York “a lively, friendly and joyful place.”

  IN ITS FIRST CENTURY, Grand Central has played a prodigious role in the annals of urban planning, beginning with William Wilgus’s ingenious monetization of air rights (the ability to transfer those rights between adjacent properties was also introduced in New York in 1916 in the nation’s first zoning ordinance). The skyrocketing value of those rights nearly doomed Grand Central until the U.S. Supreme Court delivered another victory to the terminal by upholding its landmark status and a municipality’s right to confer it. But Grand Central’s influence on planning, as profound as it was, went well beyond establishing air rights and historic preservation as fundamentals of real estate law and development.

  Recounting the cycles of building, obsolescence, and denser rebuilding that characterized Manhattan’s inexorable march uptown, James Marston Fitch, a Columbia architecture professor, and Diana S. Waite, a researcher for the state’s parks department, concluded, “Only three projects in Manhattan’s history have been able to slow down, much less to stop or reverse, this remorseless process of expansion and decay”: Central Park, Rockefeller Center, and Grand Central Terminal. Pointedly, they did not include Pennsylvania Station, which, for all its glory, spawned a few nearby hotels but never became a catalyst for further development (only now are the Hudson Yards west of the station fulfilling their potential).

  Those three megaprojects shared a number of epochal characteristics, not the least of which was they each defied the inviolable street grid that city commissioners had presciently mapped in 1811 from Houston Street all the way uptown to 155th Street. “They are significant,” Fitch and Waite wrote, “for having served to polarize the forces of growth, thus acting to stabilize the whole center of the island rather like the electro-gyroscopes employed on large ocean liners. They have not been passive containers of urban activity; instead they have acted as generators of new urban energies, infusing the urban tissues around them with nourishment and strength. This capacity is a mysterious one in urban affairs, not much analyzed and never adequately explained.”

  Attempting to do just that, the authors concluded that Wilgus’s perspicacity converted the terminal complex “from an inert obstacle to urban development into a dynamic reciprocating engine for urban activity.” The railroad air rights that Wilgus pioneered have produced a private and public development bonanza. In Manhattan alone, profits were plucked from thin air by Riverside South, where 10,000 apartments were built over the old New York Central West Side yards; the Hudson Yards project over the tracks west of Penn Station; and the Atlantic Terminal development, including the Barclays Center arena.

  GRAND CENTRAL FUNCTIONED as a metaphysical gateway in other respects. For decades, only two jobs held out much promise for black men. They could either apply for work with the post office or hope to be hired as Pullman porters. At one point, when its ranks swelled to 20,000, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of black men in the United States. Their chief patron was A. Philip Randolph, who arrived in Harlem in 1911, would become the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, would be denounced as the most dangerous black man in America, and would lead the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Because porters traveled routinely between the North and South, they were instrumental in awakening southern blacks to the Great Migration. And they were pioneers in the battles for equal rights.

  A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, “THE MOST DANGEROUS BLACK MAN IN AMERICA.”

  “If Martin Luther King was the father of the civil rights movement,” wrote Larry Tye, author of Rising from the Rails, “then A. Philip Randolph was the grandfather of the civil rights movement.” The porters were always civil but had few rights. Their pay was poor, and they depended heavily on tips. (“Tipping is objected to by austere and frugal American moralists upon the ground that it undermines the manhood and self-respect of the tippee,” the Times opined. “But this proposition loses all its force when the tippee is of African descent.”) Regardless of their given names, they were condescendingly referred to by most passengers as “George,” the first name of the Pullman Company’s founder and inventor. (Pullman’s second president was Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe’s son; the company would continue producing railroad cars and prototypes until 1987, when it was absorbed by Bombardier.) In 1914, presumably as a joke, a group of white men, many of them named George, formed a Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters George. Whatever its motives, the Pullman Company responded by placing a sign in each car with the given name of the porter on duty. As it turned out, only 362 of 12,000 porters surveyed were named George.

  The sleeping car porters union was organized in New York in large part by Ashley L. Totten, a Virgin Island–born porter for the New York Central, after periodic rebuffs by Pullman and its lopsided company union, the Pullman Plan of Employee Representation (which left porters with a basic work month of 400 hours or 11,000 miles and a $7.50 wage hike to $67.50 a month). In June 1925, Totten approached the 36-year-old Randolph, then editor of The Messenger, a black political and literary magazine, on 135th Street in Harlem and invited him to address the Pullman Porters Athletic Association.

  Totten later recalled that he was looking for someone “who had the ability and the courage, the stamina and the guts, the manhood and determination of purpose to lead the porters on.” Meeting secretly in Harlem on August 25, 1925, Totten and several hundred other porters from the New York Central and neighboring railroads voted to organize. They invited Randolph, an avowed Socialist and an outsider immune to company pressure, to be their president. Randolph, whose brother was a former porter, eventually agreed. “As history had shown, no Pullman porter could survive the attempt,” Jervis Anderson wrote in his biography of Randolph. “Randolph’s pre-eminent credential was that he could not be picked off by the Pullman Company.” The porters were in a fighting mood by then, and their motto, “Fight or Be Slaves,” bore no hint of Stepin Fetchit servility. Totten was fired by Pullman and became the brotherhood’s secretary-treasurer. Benefiting from New Deal labor legislation, the porters finally signed their first collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company in 1935 and won a charter from the American Federation of Labor that same year—the first black union to do so.

  The union’s agenda wasn’t limited to wages, though, or only to its members. In 1941, Randolph threatened a march of 100,000 blacks on Washington unless the government banned discrimination by defense contractors. On June 25, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did so and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee.

  PERHAPS THE TERMINAL’S MOST ENDURING EXPORT is about time. Until 1883, virtually every town in the country set local time by the sun. Typically, noon would be regularly signaled so people could synchronize their clocks and watches. (A ball drop down a flagpole was considered most reliable, ringing a gong less so, given the slower speed of sound. In New York the daily ball drop downtown alerted mariners and delivered a telegraphic notification to the city’s more than 2,000 jewelry stores so they could adjust their time pieces.) Whatever the method, the divergent definitions wreaked havoc on timetables as the railroads spread geographically and gained speed. Suddenly, every minute and second counted. But efforts to standardize time were uneven at best and disconnects were common. In On Time, Carlene E. Stephens recounte
d the epochal experience of Richard Cobden, the British calico baron, who was traveling by train from Boston to Providence in 1835:

  First, his train was delayed. Eventually it set off, but the passengers had to get out and walk at a stretch where the track was unfinished. Finally, the car caught fire—twice—and the travelers not only suffered more delay but received a dousing in the frenzy to put out the flames. By the time Cobden arrived at his destination, the hour was so late that all the inns in town were full. He bedded down on chairs in a public hall. Noting the elaborate instructions in the railroad regulations for what to do when delays occurred, we may conclude that such experiences were common.

  Kind of puts your daily commute in perspective.

  BY THE 1850S, Henry David Thoreau was proclaiming that trains on the Fitchburg Railroad in Massachusetts, which passed Walden Pond, were so precise “and their whistles can be heard so far, that farmers set their clocks by them.” But each railroad imposed its own standard, usually depending on where it was headquartered. Professor J.K. Rees of Columbia estimated that by 1883, the number of local standards, once as many as 100, had been halved to a still considerable and confusing 53. Meanwhile, the trackage that crisscrossed the country had expanded exponentially, from a mere 73 miles in 1830 to 9,000 by midcentury and more than 30,000 just one decade later. Cities served by multiple lines were especially vulnerable to chronological chaos. Buffalo’s station, for example, displayed three clocks: New York time for the New York Central, Columbus time for the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and Buffalo local time.