by Sam Roberts
A passenger traveling from Portland, Maine, to Buffalo could arrive in Buffalo at 12:15 according to his own watch set by Portland time. He might be met by a friend at the station whose watch indicated 11:40 Buffalo time. The Central clock said noon. The Lake Shore clock said it was only 11:25. At Pennsylvania Station in Jersey City, New Jersey, one clock displayed Philadelphia time and another New York time. When it was 12:12 in New York, it was 12:24 in Boston, 12:07 in Philadelphia, and 11:17 in Chicago. “Had there been stretched across the Continent yesterday a line of clocks extending from the extreme eastern point of Maine to the extreme western point on the Pacific Coast,” the Times mused, “and had each clock sounded an alarm at the hour of noon, local time, there would have been a continuous ringing from the east to the west lasting three-and-a-quarter hours.”
An amateur astronomer, William Lambert, proposed to Congress as early as 1809 that with the nation growing westward, time be standardized. His proposal languished for half a century, even as England, Scotland, and Wales (which covered a much smaller band longitudinally than the United States) uniformly adopted Greenwich Mean Time in 1848. In 1853, an inaccurate watch led to a crash on the Camden & Amboy railroad in New Jersey. Three days later, a Providence & Worcester train carrying spectators to a yacht race at Newport and speeding to make a steamboat connection collided on a blind curve of a single track, killing 14 passengers. A brakeman, acting as the conductor, calculated that he had enough time to switch to a siding but was relying on a watch borrowed from a milkman that was running slow. “Our columns groan again with reports of wholesale slaughter by Railroad trains,” the Times fumed. As a result, railroads in New England adopted a single standard.
The need for a national standard was hastened by the commercial development of the telegraph and, in 1862, when Congress authorized the building of the first transcontinental railroad. A year later, a rash of collisions spurred the Reverend Charles F. Dowd, coprincipal, with his wife, of Temple Grove Ladies’ Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York (a girls’ boarding school, which later became Skidmore College), to suggest multiple regional time zones.
He sketched out his proposal in 1869 and the following year presented it to railway superintendents in New York. He elaborated in a pamphlet proposing four zones 15 degrees longitude wide (the sun moves across 15 degrees every hour). Railroad trains “are the great educators and monitors of the people in teaching and maintaining exact time,” said William F. Allen, editor of the Traveler’s Official Railway Guide. But “there is today scarcely a railroad center of any importance in the United States at which the standards used by the roads entering it do not number from two to five. The adoption of the system proposed will reduce the present uncertainty to comparative if not absolute certainty.”
In 1882, Connecticut bowed to a Yale astronomer, Leonard Waldo, and enacted a standard time that replaced the separate times set by railroads to synchronize their schedules separately with the clocks in Boston, Hartford, New Haven, New London, and New York. A national standard was something else entirely. As Allen wrote, “How can this reform be accomplished? It is on record that a small religious body once adopted two resolutions as a declaration of its faith. The first was, Resolved, that the saints should govern the earth. Second, Resolved that we are the saints.”
A version of Dowd’s proposal was finally embraced by the General Railway Time Convention in 1883—representing most of the lines that controlled 93,000 miles of rail—to take effect nationwide a month later at noon, Sunday, November 18. For the first time, a traveler going cross-country could rely on the minute hand of his watch telling the correct time, with only the hour changing as he passed from one time zone into another. No longer would clocks be chiming continuously for three and a quarter hours. Instead, they would ring in each hour simultaneously, even if the hour would be different in each time zone.
In New York, they would strike noon approximately 3 minutes, 58 seconds, and 38 one-hundredths of a second earlier than they had the day before. All over the country, Americans greeted the change with Y2K trepidation and with not a little resentment that the railroads were once again impinging on their daily routines. A local prophet in Charleston, South Carolina, warned that toying with time would provoke divine displeasure (sure enough, a major earthquake struck there three years later). Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit refused to comply, and Cincinnati delayed adoption of standard time for seven years. The mayor of Bangor, Maine, rejected the new standard, declaring that “neither railroad laws nor municipal regulations have the power to change from the immutable laws of God.”
CLOCK MASTER WILLIAM STEINHAUSER MAINTAINED THE 13-FOOT-DIAMETER TIMEPIECE. THE VI PANE OPENS FOR A PARK AVENUE VIEW.
Boston’s commissioner of insolvency, Edward Jenkins, refusing to comply with the new standard, declared Horace Clapp in default on November 19, 1883, because he got to court a minute late by local time but 15 minutes early under standard time. Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that while the standard had not been adopted by the state legislature, the popular community consensus—standard time, as imposed the day before in Boston by the city council—applied.
J.M. TOUCEY, general superintendent of the New York Central, announced that beginning November 18 all trains would run on “New Standard, 75th median time, which is four minutes slower than the present standard.” The official timekeeper at the time was the Western Union Company at 195 Broadway. There, in Room No. 48, James Hamblet, the superintendent of the Time Telegraph Company, planned to stop his regulator clock at 11 a.m. New York time, pause the requisite 3 minutes, 58 seconds, and start it again on standard time on the 75th meridian as verified with observatories in Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
The first noon under standard time would be signaled by the regular dropping of the 42-inch-diameter, 125-pound copper time ball from a 22-foot-high staff atop the Western Union Building, triggered by a signal from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington that tripped a magnetic latch. Trains across the country would be stopped to adjust their timetables to standard time. A crowd gathered in front of the Western Union Building to celebrate the “Day of Two Noons” and to watch the time ball drop twice—first on local time and four minutes later on the new eastern standard time. Despite the public apprehension about changing times, the New York Tribune dryly concluded, “There was no convulsion of nature, and no signs have been discovered of political or social revolution.”
Even earlier, at 10 that morning in New York, a horological revolution took place. Grand Central became the first railroad station in the nation to adopt standard time. Seeking to minimize the disruption, the New York Central figured earlier was better. To accommodate the Central, Hamblet stopped the pendulum of his regulator clock at 9 a.m. instead of 11.
Following the American example, countries around the globe adopted time zones too. “No crisis forced the railroads to alter the way they kept time, no federal legislation mandated the change, no public demand had precipitated it,” the historian Carlene Stephens wrote. “The railroads voluntarily rearranged the entire country’s public timekeeping, albeit under the threat of government interference if they did nothing. The country, for the most part, went along without too much reluctance.”
Industrialization and urbanization were taking their toll on spontaneity, even as travel became speedier and leisure time increased. Americans were becoming “increasingly attentive to and accountable for living and working in synchronized ways,” Stephens wrote, although it would take until 1918 for Congress to formally establish standard time and daylight savings time.
Today, Grand Central’s master clock is located on the Lower Level near Track 117. It looks like an oversize blue refrigerator and is synchronized every second by a signal from the atomic clock at the Naval Observatory in Bethesda, Maryland, where time is measured by the vibrations of a cesium atom. The master clock controls every official timepiece in the terminal, from the four-f
aced golden ball clock atop the information booth in the Main Concourse to the clock on the 42nd Street façade. Still, one clock in the terminal, in the Graybar Passage looking west toward the Main Concourse, sometimes sends mixed messages. The hands are always correct, but the sign beneath it is wrong for nearly half the year. The Central was so proud of its role in inaugurating time zones that the builders of Grand Central carved “Eastern Standard Time” into the marble under the clock in 1913, five years before Congress imposed daylight savings time.
Western Union’s shift to standard time in New York was overseen by William Allen, the Railway Guide editor, whose name, the Times declared, “will be forever connected with the successful accomplishment of one of the most useful reforms possible to the heretofore often bewildered traveler.” How long Allen was remembered is arguable. The Reverend Charles Dowd faded from public memory even faster, though. Dowd died underneath the wheels of a Delaware & Hudson locomotive at a grade crossing in Saratoga, New York, in 1904. History does not record whether the train was on time.
PRESERVATIONISTS RALLIED ON THE VIADUCT OVER PERSHING SQUARE UNDER THE COMMODORE’S APPROVING GAZE.
SAVING GRAND CENTRAL
THE TEMPLE OF DENDUR was built in Egypt 19 centuries before Grand Central Terminal. It celebrated a river, not a railroad. And it stood 6,000 miles from the middle of Manhattan. But the Temple and Grand Central had one very important person in common, a woman whose prestige led to their salvation. Momentum for what might very well have been the end of Grand Central came to a screeching halt with a surprise telephone call in 1975 to the Municipal Art Society. “There’s a woman on the phone,” Laurie Beckelman, a dubious 22-year-old assistant, told her boss, Kent Barwick, “who claims to be Jackie Onassis.”
Onassis was no newcomer to historic preservation. Her love affair with the Temple of Dendur started while her first husband was president and she was restoring the White House. The Egyptian government offered up a smorgasbord of monuments to the United States in gratitude for gifts from the Kennedy administration to save the temple and other antiquities from flooding caused by construction of the Aswan Dam. Onassis immediately chose the temple. Years later, she moved into a Fifth Avenue apartment that provided a stunning vista of the salvaged temple, which was installed in a glass jewel box at the Metropolitan Museum of Art across the street. By special arrangement, the museum would illuminate the temple at night so she could show it off to guests.
Onassis’s call to the Municipal Art Society was prompted by an article in the Times. A few days before, on January 21, 1975, State Supreme Court Justice Irving H. Saypol had voided the designation of Grand Central Terminal as a city landmark. The decision went well beyond the realm of aesthetic criticism, although Saypol gratuitously belittled the terminal as leaving “no reaction here other than of a long neglected faded beauty.” Without ruling on the constitutionality of the decade-old landmarks law, he decided in favor of the Penn Central Railroad, owners of the terminal. By not allowing the railroad to place a revenue-producing 59-story skyscraper above the terminal, Saypol said that the city was causing “economic hardship” so severe that it amounts to “a taking of property”—the property, in this case, being the very air rights that William Wilgus had conceived of seven decades earlier. Deep inside the Times story on Saypol’s decision was a paragraph that caught Onassis’s eye: “It was learned last night that the Municipal Art Society would announce within the next week the formation of a citywide committee to work for the preservation of the terminal and to support the city in its expected appeal.”
IN A WAY, you could blame the whole landmarking mess on William Wilgus. Arguably, his very conception of Grand Central Terminal provided the deep roots for its potential destruction. As the Central’s chief engineer, in 1903 he, in effect, created the intangible legal principle of air rights, which the successor railroad—bankrupt and hemorrhaging—wanted to transform into an office building that would generate hefty rental revenue. Unwittingly, another Wilgus innovation also laid the groundwork for the terminal’s threatened demolition. He originally envisioned a revenue-producing tower atop the depot. While it was never built, the structural support for a future skyscraper was installed as the six-story bases off the four corners of the main concourse. The tower proposal largely lay dormant for 50 years.
BY THE END OF THAT HALF-CENTURY, long-distance passenger traffic was plummeting while deficits from passenger service were ballooning. The Suburban Concourse, now known as the Lower Level, was closed altogether by midcentury. By 1954, the Central was sending only 18 long-distance trains weekdays from Grand Central to upstate and the West, compared with 32 in 1947. The Central’s president, Alfred E. Perlman (he later joined Howard Newman at the Western Pacific Railroad, but there is no evidence that he inspired the Mad magazine character), threatened to shutter Grand Central altogether and leave passengers to fend for themselves on public transportation from the Bronx or Westchester. Even from as far north as Croton-Harmon, Perlman said, “they can get into New York the way they do when they fly into Idlewild Airport.” (He also suggested integrating the city’s subway system and the Central’s Park Avenue tracks, which, he said, would be far less costly than building a proposed Second Avenue subway.)
In 1954, the Central announced that it was mulling construction of the world’s tallest building on the site of its terminal, which railroad officials claimed was running a $24 million annual deficit. The Central’s spectacular Hyberboloid, an ambitious 108-story, nearly 5-million-square-foot tower, designed for William Zeckendorf by I.M. Pei, would be topped by an observation tower that would boost its height to 1,600 feet, well beyond the 1,250-foot Empire State Building. The proposal, and a subsequent alternative (ironically by a successor firm to the terminal’s original architects), generated an outcry. Architectural Forum published a letter signed by 220 architects pleading that the terminal’s Main Concourse be spared. They called the concourse “probably the finest big room in New York” and continued their paean:
It belongs in fact to the nation. People admire it as travel carries them through from all parts of the world. It is… one of those very few building achievements that… has come to stand for our country. This great room is noble in its proportions, alive in the way the various levels and passages work in and out of it, sturdy and reassuring in its construction, splendid in its materials—but that is just the beginning. Its appeal recognizes no top limit of sophistication, no bottom limit. The most exacting architectural critic agrees in essentials with the newsboy at the door.
The Times added tentatively that “before the plans reach rigid crystallization, there is a chance that public opinion can persuade the heads of these railroads to consider some scheme whereby, without arresting the desirable progress implicit in their project, this great piece of civic architecture could be spared.” Four years later, Pei’s proposal had morphed into Grand Central City, an octagonal skyscraper that would become known as the Pan Am and later as the Met Life Building, a massive 2.4-million-square-foot hulk—surpassed in bulk at the time only by the Pentagon and the Chicago Merchandise Mart. The tower was sandwiched between Grand Central and its corporate headquarters but spared the terminal itself. The humongous building’s 45,000-ton steel frame was supported by 200 existing columns and another 95 sunk into bedrock, 55 feet below the surface. Some concessions to Grand Central were proffered. The bulk was cut from 3 million square feet. The axis was rotated to east-west, to give the New York Central Building a little more breathing room. Still, the Times’ architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, wrote:
GRAND CENTRAL LOOKING NORTH, WHEN MOSTLY HOTELS AND POSH APARTMENT BUILDINGS STRADDLED PARK AVENUE.
Many planners agree that this addition to an overbuilt New York is one more rapid step toward the certain strangulation of the city, and its eventual reduction to total paralysis. However, as long as private enterprise controls city land, use and economics and legislation offer no incentives to improved urban design, such buildings are inev
itable, and neither developer nor designer is to blame. The blockbuster building is here to stay, a singular symptom of one of the most disturbing characteristics of our age: A loss of human scale that seems irrevocably tied to a loss of human values.
Developed by Erwin S. Wolfson and designed by Emory Roth & Sons with Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi, the tower replaced the six-story Grand Central Terminal Office Building just north of the terminal. Grand Central City was hailed by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller as emblematic of the genius and creativity of the free enterprise system. Harper’s magazine begged to differ. “When Commodore Vanderbilt, surely a champion of free enterprise, organized the Grand Central area, enterprise was free enough to create order in the grand manner of Versailles, on the grand scale of the railway age. What is happening now is hardly more than what happened in Rome in the Dark Ages—men tear down great works to put up the best they can.”