Grand Central

by Sam Roberts

  The critic V.S. Pritchett was even less forgiving. Noting that the Pan Am Building was financed by his fellow Brits, he observed (in an uncredited bow to William Wilgus), “No other city I can think of has anything like the undulating miles that fly down Park Avenue from 96th Street to Grand Central blocked now though it is by the brutal mass of the Pan Am Building—a British affront to the city spoken of as a revenge for Suez.”

  The Central hoped that an anticipated $1 million in rentals would help stanch its bleeding. Instead, the new building touched off a simmering dispute with the New Haven Railroad over who owned the terminal and adjacent property. It also whetted the deficit-ridden Central’s appetite to develop even more real estate. In 1961, the railroad’s request to install a three-level bowling alley over the main waiting room, which would have lowered its ceiling from 60 feet to 15, was rejected by the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals (because it was located in a restricted retail area, a bowling alley would violate zoning regulations). But prominent architects and civic groups warned that the victory was just a skirmish before an inevitable epic battle over the terminal’s future.

  THAT SAME YEAR, across town, the Pennsylvania Railroad had optioned the air rights over Penn Station, fulfilling a dream of Alexander Cassatt, the line’s president when Penn Station was being built (he was dissuaded by his architect from placing a hotel atop the station because the railroad owed the city a “thoroughly and distinctly monumental gateway”). The Beaux Arts–style station, flanked by 84 Roman columns, had faded even less elegantly than Grand Central, its junior by three years, since demolition was announced in 1961. It was seedy. And grimy. The roof was leaking. Maintenance costs were draining its corporate parent.

  Despite protests from preservationists, demolition began on October 28, 1963, with the staccato sound of jackhammers tearing into the station’s granite skin and the lowering of a stone eagle. “Just another job,” said John Rezin, foreman of the wrecking crew. His assessment was echoed by Morris Lipsett, president of the demolition company: “If anybody seriously considered it art, they would have put up some money to save it.”

  The detritus of a great station would be ignominiously dumped in the Secaucus Meadows as landfill for what would become the Meadowlands. “The message was terribly clear,” the Times’ Ada Louise Huxtable wrote. “Tossed into that Secaucus graveyard were about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.” A banal office building and the fourth incarnation of Madison Square Garden rose in its place. Indeed, if Pennsy passengers and Long Island Rail Road commuters felt claustrophobic, they were justified. The ceiling of the old station’s awesome main waiting room was 150 feet high. In the new one, it would barely reach 25 feet. Vincent Scully memorably summed up what had been lost. “One entered the city like a god,” he wrote. “One scuttles in now like a rat.”

  BUT PENN STATION WOULD NOT DIE IN VAIN. In a city that never valued its history as much as Boston or Philadelphia did (“History is for losers,” Ken Jackson, the Columbia history professor, japes), where relatively sparse prime space is periodically recycled to produce bulkier and taller buildings, razing Penn Station fueled an unexpected backlash. “I really believe Grand Central Terminal was saved because of what happened at Penn Station,” said Peter Samton, an architect and civic leader who lobbied to save them both. Earlier in 1961, even before the wrecking crew went to work and with development threatening other historic landmarks, such as Carnegie Hall and the Alexander Hamilton Grange, Mayor Robert F. Wagner appointed a committee to research the applicability of the Bard Act, first suggested in 1913, the year Grand Central Terminal opened, and finally passed by the state legislature in 1956.

  VIEWED FROM THE WEST BALCONY, THE MAIN CONCOURSE WAS COMMERCIALIZED UNTIL THE METROPOLITAN TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY INTERVENED.

  The act empowered localities to create special zoning or land-use protection for historically or aesthetically distinguished places. “As time marches on,” wrote Francis Keally, past president of both the Municipal Art Society and the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, “it behooves all of us to keep a watchful eye on any changes that would affect the aesthetic possessions of New York, and, when necessary, our voices should be heard in combating any such attempts to destroy the cherished remembrance of the past.”

  In April 1963, before the demolition of Penn Station began, Wagner formally endorsed the recommendation of his committee and named a 12-member Landmarks Preservation Commission. The commission came too late for Penn Station, though, prompting the New York chapter of the architects institute to lament, “Like ancient Rome, New York seems bent on tearing down its finest buildings. In Rome, demolition was a piecemeal process which took over 1,000 years; in New York demolition is absolute and complete in a matter of months. The rise of modern archaeology put an end to this kind of vandalism in Rome, but in our city no such deterrent exists.” Two years later, the city council overcame the objections of real estate developers and codified a permanent commission armed with police power and the right of eminent domain. The law also provided tax abatements to hard-pressed property owners.

  THE MAYOR’S TEMPORARY COMMISSION had already identified 700 sites that were considered valuable enough historically or aesthetically to be preserved. Community Planning Board No. 5 in Midtown voted overwhelmingly against landmark status for Grand Central, but surprisingly little controversy was generated at a commission hearing on May 10, 1966. Three witnesses appeared in favor. Virtually the only opposition was mustered by lawyers for the railroad itself. Robert Tinsley, representing the Municipal Art Society, unabashedly proclaimed the terminal “the most magnificent railroad station in the world.” He described it as “purely an American building bearing the full stamp of the American Renaissance” and said Jules Félix Coutan’s sculpture on the 42nd Street façade “is the best of its kind of the 20th Century anywhere.”

  Another speaker, William Lynn McCracken Sr., of Staten Island, referred the commission to a 1959 essay by Henry Hope Reed. In his The Golden City (a book that Jacqueline Onassis described as “like finding a long-sought friend or mentor”), Reed waxed rhapsodic about the “colossal Mercury who motions to us to view the splendor that transportation has created” and unequivocally concluded, “No Picturesque Secessionist terminal can even attempt to rival the Grand Central or any other of our great classical terminals, because today’s designer refuses to recognize the theatrical, nay, operatic, qualities of art.”

  Methodically working its way through hundreds of potential sites deemed worthy of preservation, on August 6, 1967, the permanent commission declared 11 structures—including Carnegie Hall, Hamilton Grange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Highbridge Park water tower, and Grand Central Terminal—New York City landmarks, bringing to nearly 200 the structures it had designated during its first two years. Grand Central was described as “a magnificent example of French Beaux Arts architecture; that it is one of the great buildings of America, that it represents a creative engineering solution of a very difficult problem, combined with artistic splendor; that as an American Railroad Station it is unique in quality, distinction, character; and that this building plays a significant role in the life and development of New York City.”

  The terminal “evokes a spirit that is unique in this city,” the designation added, and “combines distinguished architecture with a brilliant engineering solution, wedded to one of the most fabulous railroad terminals of our time. Monumental in scale, this great building functions as well today as it did when it was built.” Grand Central, the commission concluded, “always has been a symbol of the city itself.”

  But the terminal’s reprieve was only temporary. Within a few weeks, the beleaguered New York Central was inviting architects to submit plans for a 2-million-square-foot building as tall as 45 stories atop Grand Central’s main waiting room.

  BY THEN, the New York Central was virtual
ly bankrupt and was running out of alternatives to generate revenue. The railroad had already wantonly commercialized the terminal by monetizing every square inch it could (including the Colorama, which was billed as the world’s largest photograph transparency, and the 13.5-foot-diameter replica of the Westclox Big Ben clock over the south concourse). The clutter manifested itself in nonmaterial ways too. In 1949, the railroad experimented with daily canned Muzak broadcasts from more than 40 loudspeakers and accompanied by 240 commercials over 17 hours (which netted the railroad $1,800 a week, against what it said was then an $11 million annual deficit to operate the terminal).

  Leading the charge against the audio intrusion was Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, who figured that any interference with people’s ability to concentrate on a book or magazine was bad for business—his. “If they get away with this, nobody will be able to read on any means of conveyance in the United States,” he complained.

  Appearing before a state Public Service Commission panel, the railroad’s lawyer challenged Ross’s assertion that the broadcasts made his ears ring. He was asked whether his own hearing was good. “It is perfect,” Ross testified. “It is too good. Under the circumstances I am thinking of having an ear drum punctured.” Ross denied that he had urged the magazine’s readers to complain, but the railroad lawyer produced a “Talk of the Town” item that exhorted readers to do just that. To which Ross, unfazed, replied: “I beg your pardon, I guess I must have read that in Grand Central Terminal.”

  At the hearing, James F. Johnson, a former Secret Service agent, recalled how he had lost his ailing mother-in-law in the terminal because his wife became befuddled by the hubbub, which was compounded by the fact that the paging service had been discontinued in favor of lucrative commercials. James L. Fly, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, declared that “the forced feeding of advertising” destroys a listener’s right not to listen. Harold J. Harris, a psychiatrist, cautioned that the noise pollution could unleash behavior triggered by “suppressed rage.” Another witness, Virginia L. Rowland, warned of even more dire consequences. “It is not too fantastic,” she testified, “that one of those employed in the terminal might go berserk and start shooting up the customers.” A month later, the Central capitulated, halting the broadcasts and acknowledging, without saying so in as many words, that its experiment was unsound.

  BUT IF COMMERCIALS weren’t enough to drive away passengers, long-distance rail travel was doomed by airplanes and the construction of a concrete web of interstate highways. Railroads were under assault, especially passenger service, which couldn’t compete and which the lines subjugated to more profitable freight. (Robert R. Young, the Central’s chairman, memorably observed that until 1946, pigs huddled into freight cars could cross the country without changing trains, but passengers could not.) The Central’s passenger revenues plummeted from $135.5 million in 1948 to $106.5 million in 1954 and a mere $55 million a decade later.

  NINETY-FIVE COLUMNS WERE SUNK INTO BEDROCK 55 FEET BENEATH PARK AVENUE FOR WHAT BECAME THE PAN AM BUILDING.

  “I live in the twilight of railroading, the going down of its sun,” E.B. White wrote in 1960. “For the past few months I’ve been well aware that I am the Unwanted Passenger, one of the last survivors of a vanishing and ugly breed. Indeed, if I am to believe the statements I see in the papers, I am all that stands between the Maine railroads and a bright future of hauling fast freight for a profit.”

  Moreover, while automobiles and airplanes achieved dazzling speeds, the trains he rode to and from New York and his farm in Maine maintained their “accustomed gait” of just over 30 mph. “This is an impressive record,” he concluded. “It’s not every institution that can hold to an ideal through 55 years of our fastest-moving century.” The Pennsylvania Railroad was in a similarly precarious position. Real estate ventures like Penn Plaza, which replaced Penn Station, and the Pan Am Building had bought time for the railroads but were insufficient to cover mounting costs and diminishing revenue. On February 1, 1968, the unthinkable happened. A worst-case scenario loomed as the only remaining option for survival. The New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad merged to form the Penn Central. The combine, which became the country’s biggest real estate company and the owner, through Madison Square Garden, of the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, would last two years before declaring bankruptcy itself—the nation’s largest. (In 1976, the railroad was folded into Conrail, which was created by the federal government to run failing freight lines; the former Penn Central Corporation morphed into American Premier Underwriters, part of Carl Lindner’s American Financial Group.)

  By then, the Long Island Rail Road, which the Pennsylvania had controlled since 1900, would have been sold off to New York State for $65 million. New York and the Connecticut Transportation Authority would buy or lease the Central’s tracks from Grand Central to Connecticut and pay Penn Central to operate the commuter service. A similar arrangement would produce Metro-North in 1983, leading Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen, who wrote The Wreck of the Penn Central, to conclude, “Thus, close to a quarter of a million commuters in the nation’s largest city ride trains that are state owned or are heavily subsidized by public agencies. If this isn’t ‘nationalization’ it is something quite close to it.”

  FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE MERGER, the new company proposed building a 55-story cast-stone and granite slab designed by Marcel Breuer and developed by Morris Saady, which, as the builders described it, would be “floated” above Grand Central and rise 150 feet higher than the Pan Am Building. One design called for the tower to be cantilevered above the terminal to preserve the façade. An alternative would raze one side of the terminal to create a uniform front but preserve the Main Concourse. The tower known as 175 Park Avenue would generate at least $3 million annually for the Penn Central from air rights alone. Neither version was embraced by city officials or by many prominent architects.

  “Horrible—terrible,” said Richard Roth, who was the principal architect of the Pan Am Building. “We put the Pan Am Building way back from the main part of the terminal, replacing an ugly structure over the train shed. It formed a gracious backdrop for the terminal itself.” Architect Philip Johnson declared the proposal an “outrage,” adding, “I was against the Pan Am Building, against the idiotic idea of putting bowling alleys in the waiting-room space when that was brought up a few years ago, and I’m against this new thing. It’s wrong in every possible way.”

  The City Planning Commission had no jurisdiction because the proposed building did not require any zoning variances. That didn’t stop Donald Elliott, the commission chairman, from pronouncing the proposal “the wrong building, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” Ada Louise Huxtable weighed in a few days later and was no less unequivocal. She called Breuer’s blueprint “a bizarre scheme that could only be conceived in and for New York.” Worse still, it created a heads-they-win, tails-you-lose dilemma. “Designation by the Landmarks Commission does not insure preservation,” she acknowledged. “All the railroad has to do is show that the building is enough of a losing proposition to prove ‘hardship’ under the landmarks law and permission must be given to demolish after certain procedures have been satisfied. This is having your landmark, but taking a certain calculated risk of dooming it.”

  In one version or another, the historians James Marston Fitch and Diana S. Waite later wrote, “The Breuer scheme had several architectural merits and two insuperable drawbacks.” The merits, such as they were, included the preservation of the concourse, the waiting room, and the façade. “But,” they wrote, “the negative aspects of the proposed alteration are profound and are ambiental in nature”—that the tower would suck up all the air from the remaining sky space and place an impossible burden on already overloaded public transportation.

  On September 20, 1968, under its chairman, Harmon H. Goldstone, the landmarks commission rejected the developer’s claim that the project would have “no exterior e
ffect.” That touched off a full year of verbal jousting and counterproposals—including a promise by the developer to preserve the Main Concourse if the commission allowed him to construct the tower. (The commission’s jurisdiction extended only to the exterior.)

  On August 26, 1969, the commission voted 8 to 0 to deny the Penn Central permission to mongrelize the terminal. Its rejection of a certificate of appropriateness derided the two plans as so massive that they “would reduce the landmark itself to the status of a curiosity” and declared that “to balance a 55-story office tower above a flamboyant Beaux-Arts façade seems nothing more than an aesthetic joke.” The second alternative was even worse, the commission concluded. “To protect a landmark, one does not tear it down. To perpetuate its architectural features, one does not strip them off.”

  Moreover, the commission said that the terminal’s aesthetic value had to be considered in its physical context in a city that, unlike Paris, had few “dramatically terminated vistas.” Echoing V.S. Pritchett, the commission wrote that New York had “Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street, Washington Arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue and the RCA Building at the end of the Rockefeller Center gardens. Yet none of these have the sweep that Park Avenue still provides for the Grand Central Terminal from the south.” To mitigate any hardship claim by the railroad, the commission empowered the Penn Central to transfer the air rights to other developers at nearby sites.

  Instead, less than two months later, the Penn Central sued.

  THE RAILROAD ARGUED in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan that the commission’s rejections were unconstitutional because they went “beyond the scope of any permissible regulation and constitute a taking of plaintiff’s private property for public use without just compensation.” The suit, seeking $8 million for each year development was delayed, even challenged the landmark character of Grand Central as “highly debatable and at best doubtful.” “The aesthetic quality of the south façade is obscured by its engulfment among narrow streets and high-rise buildings,” the Penn Central’s lawyers from Dewey, Ballentine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood contended. “It is hardly seen at all except for a short distance to the south on Park Avenue, and even there the view of the façade is intersected by the encircling roadway and by the tall buildings that line Park Avenue. Furthermore,” the railroad’s lawyers argued, in what amounted to a stinging architectural indictment of the Penn Central’s earlier air rights venture, “the terminal is set against the backdrop and contrasting lines of the Pan Am Building, which appears to hang over the terminal and to dwarf it.” (This argument was a little like the defendant accused of parricide begging for mercy because he is an orphan.)