by Sam Roberts
Stephen T. Kelly, a retired manager of Grand Central, worked for the railroad for four decades. Once he allowed the Main Concourse to be transformed into a ballroom on New Year’s Eve 1963 for a benefit. “Thirty-seven years a railroad man,” he said. “And yesterday I had to go downtown to get fingerprinted for a cabaret license!”
For decades, Billy Keogh melodiously cried out the arrival times of trains and their tracks, as revealed by the Teletype at his fingertips. But while live announcements still are made periodically from the stationmaster’s office—in addition to recorded warnings about unattended packages or watching the gap between the trains and the platform—train departures are not routinely announced with the proverbial “All aboard” (the way Daniel Simmons, the legendary train announcer at Penn Station, did). That’s because most trains regularly leave on the same track, and, because they are not passing through as they would in a station, there is typically more time to board. (The “voice” of Grand Central belongs to Daniel Brucker, who joined Metro-North as a press secretary in 1987 and is now the terminal’s irrepressible manager of tours. He described his dulcet tones as “sort of like the distant voice from the past—one that you’d hear coming from your Dumont television set, intoning about the marvels of power steering, awaiting you in your brand new 1952 DeSoto.”)
OFFICER PETER CHAMBERTIDES (LEFT) WITH BRYAN HENRY, WHO RETIRED AS A LIEUTENANT IN 2009 AND WAS KNOWN FOR HELPING THE HOMELESS.
In 1967, Lester Onderdonk of Hastings, who hailed from an old railroad family, was replaced by a 59-by-11-foot electric billboard installed over the ticket booths to display the arrival and departure of trains. He wasn’t pleased with other people’s notion of progress, which eliminated the jobs of three railroad employees who had wielded chalk to post the times on a blackboard in the waiting room under Vanderbilt Avenue. “I hope that when they plug in the new system, when it is finished in a week or two, the whole thing blows up,” he told a reporter. It didn’t, but the electromechanical board was eventually succeeded by rows of flipping panels for each letter and number (a version was immortalized at the Museum of Modern Art), and the flip board was replaced by another innovation from Solari Udine of Italy, liquid crystal display modules.
Progress, of sorts, also eliminated another job, Mary Lee Read’s. She was the terminal’s organist beginning in 1928 and presided from a console on the east end of the Philosophers’ Gallery. Once, she was suddenly inspired to interrupt a Bach piece to play “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”—twice. Two years later, she told the New Yorker in 1947, she was informed that a man who had been walking through the station on his way to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge heard her performance. “It was his mother’s favorite hymn, and he stopped and listened to it,” she recalled. “It just broke his heart. Instead of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, he went to Cleveland and organized a mission.” Read was touted as the only organist in America expressly forbidden to play the national anthem. The last time she did, during the evening rush on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, pedestrian traffic froze. Commuters missed their trains. She continued to play holiday favorites in the weeks preceding Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter through the mid-1950s. (Read’s fan base rivaled that of Gladys Gooding, a fellow organist immortalized as the answer to a trivia stumper: Who was the only person who played in the same year for the Knicks, the Rangers, and the Brooklyn Dodgers?)
Five-foot-five Timothy P. Curley, a conductor, has regaled commuters on the 82-mile run north to Wassaic with local history and pop psychology as a former Transcendental Meditation instructor. One passenger recalled the time a bunch of rowdy prep school kids were acting out next to an elderly lady. “And he went up to the kids,” the passenger remembered, “and he said, ‘Is this lady bothering you?’ And they immediately got quiet.”
Harry Kelly, the stationmaster, grew up in the Bronx and has worked at Grand Central since 1973. He’s responsible for 600 cleaners, custodians, ticket sellers, and craftsmen who work in the terminal. Also in 1973, when he was 21, Robert Leiblong, who commutes from Brewster, started working as a trackman to pay off his college loans. Later, he earned a master’s degree in engineering and became Metro-North’s senior vice president for operations, supervising a staff including 850 conductors and assistant conductors (165 of them women), 600 engineers who drive the trains (including 20 women), and 60 rail traffic controllers, among the more than 5,000 employees who maintain the trains and tracks.
Some alumni can’t get enough of Grand Central. Edward G. Fischer joined the New York Central as a messenger in 1908, when he was 15, and rose to become the stationmaster known as “Mr. Courtesy.” He kept a framed aphorism in his office that defined courtesy as “a little thing with a big meaning.” Fischer retired as stationmaster in 1958 after a 49-year stint with the railroad but returned a year later as a part-time news dealer. “I love this place like a second home,” he said. “I just couldn’t stay away.”
REDCAPS have been among Grand Central’s most visible employees and, legend has it, they began there. James H. Williams, the son of a slave, who began his career as a doorman at Thaley’s Florist Shop on Fifth Avenue, was hired as a porter (their caps define them as “attendant”) when the force included 25 whites and two blacks. He worked his way up to chief in 1909 and served 45 years, until his death in 1948 (when there was only one white redcap, Milton Newman, left). Along the way, Williams encouraged young black men to work their way through college as baggage handlers (“Do not tip the Red Caps,” early timetables advised passengers). Some accounts say that he originated the redcaps when, as an enterprising teenager one Labor Day, he fastened a piece of red flannel to his hat as a signal that he was available to help with luggage, according to Eric Arnesen’s Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality.
A SMALL ARMY OF REDCAPS SERVED PASSENGERS.
Whatever the origins of the name, the distinctive cap caught on across the country. Williams, who always wore a white carnation in his lapel, “raised the dignity of carrying bags from something to do when there is no other job to that of public service, a job of self-respect requiring men of the best caliber,” the playwright Abram Hill wrote in 1939, when redcaps were making about $2,000 a year, tips—typically a dime—included. “He has proved that the old superstition that Negroes would not work under a Negro is false.” The Chief was well-known to generations of New Yorkers and visitors, including youngsters who needed to borrow money to get home after a costly weekend in the city. “ ‘Jim will take care of you at the terminal’ is a phrase many a young New Yorker has heard from his father and mother,” one biographer wrote.
The civil rights leader Lester B. Granger worked as a redcap under the Chief, recalling what amounted to a postgraduate education at Grand Central as he “roamed the paved stretches of the station’s labyrinths, chasing down travelers with bags as a beagle hound chases a rabbit.” When Williams died, Granger wrote,
remembering him with great affectionate sorrow will be ‘Grand Central Alumni’ from New York to California, and from Miami to Seattle. These former students of the Chief are, many of them, successful professional and businessmen, most of them with a tendency toward flat feet and ulcers. But one and all, they will acknowledge their terrific debt to Chief Williams, for he had the kindly wisdom to keep open at Grand Central a generous supply of jobs each year for Negro college students. He had the judgment to rule them with a rod of iron. But rule them as he might, he liked them and believed in them, and they today are grateful to him.
Williams commanded a small army of 500, of whom, he once estimated, 100 were attending college and another 25 were graduates. Samuel Battle, who became New York’s first black police officer, was a redcap under Williams. In 1927, Williams’s son Wesley was hired as the city’s first black firefighter. Another son was a college president. When he died, Elizabeth Eckard, who supervised the Travelers Aid Society, said, “We can’t run Grand Central without the Chief. He’s as much
a part of the place as the Twentieth Century.”
METRO-NORTH, NOW THE NATION’S BUSIEST COMMUTER RAILROAD, IS POISED TO HANDLE 100 MILLION PASSENGERS ANNUALLY, AS THE TERMINAL’S BUILDERS PROJECTED.
COMMUTATION
IF ROMANTIC LONG-DISTANCE TRAINS defined the terminal in the first half of its 100 years, commuters have done so in the second half. Commuter trains never developed the cachet that their long-distance cousins acquired, but carrying passengers to and from New York’s suburbs—giving the city its “tidal restlessness,” E.B. White wrote—was becoming a larger share of Grand Central’s traffic. (White himself bought his first copy of the New Yorker in the terminal in 1925 and later recalled, “I practically lived in Grand Central at one period—it has all the conveniences and I had no other place to stay.”) In 1906, while the terminal was still being built, 10 million commuters rode the New York Central and the New Haven lines. By 1930, their ranks had more than tripled, to 36 million of the 47 million or so total passengers whom Grand Central Terminal accommodated that year.
For well over a century, suburban commuters have been caricatured and uncharitably denigrated as elitist tree-huggers rendered zombie-like by their daily ritual. The New York of the commuter, White acidly wrote, “is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night,” adding unapologetically, “The suburb he inhabits had no essential vitality of its own and is a mere roost where he comes at day’s end to go to sleep. Except in rare cases, the man who lives in Mamaroneck or Little Neck or Teaneck, and works in New York, discovers nothing much about the city except the time of arrival and departure of trains and buses, and the path to a quick lunch… The commuter dies with tremendous mileage to his credit, but he is no rover.”
Few profiles were as eviscerating as Gail Sheehy’s in New York magazine in 1968, when New Yorkers were beginning to feel a little defensive about their town and wondering whether, in the middle of a transit strike two years earlier, the columnist Dick Schaap was engaging in bitter irony when, paraphrasing Mayor John V. Lindsay, he dubbed New York “Fun City.” Sheehy’s profile began: “They never stop moving. They come into Grand Central every morning off the 86-seat sit-up hearses. And every night the blank faces look out of Charlie Brown’s bar at the Pan Am escalators and wait to go home at the same time on the same train in the same car with the same ‘congenial group.’ ”
The daily tide of commuters might seem anonymous—even to their fellow passengers—but they fell into categories that Sheehy acerbically described. They included the congenial Mad Men going home to wives and families. “Avid agency and fashion geishas know they can learn from these men,” she wrote. “Pick up the Avenue style, pick up a telephone recommendation from a bar car titillation. They are known as Belles of the Bar Car.” The regulars included a less congenial character, she explained: “No one wants to become a Tunnel Inspector, a man who sits alone, speaks to no one and—when the morning train goes under at Park and 96th—races through to stand between the couplings of the two head cars.” Regardless of which category the commuter belonged to, each shared the same fate, according to Sheehy: “There is one inexorable inevitability about his life: At both ends of his day, like margins, is another train to catch.”
NOW WHAT? PERPLEXED COMMUTERS CONVERGE ON THE INFORMATION BOOTH DURING A NEW YORK SUBWAY AND BUS WORKERS’ STRIKE.
JOHN CHEEVER’S FICTIONAL SHADY HILL was populated by desperate commuters, and Gregory Peck’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was one. But changing demography has challenged the stereotypes (nearly half the commuters today are women). And even when generalizations were more valid, each commuter had an individual story to tell, and the mass of commuters, like the earlier waves of long-distance passengers, came to Grand Central, at least when they first arrived, with dreams. Jim Link, an accountant from Greenwich, his grandfather, a psychiatrist, and his father, an artist, commuted in tandem from the suburbs for a century. “For over 100 years,” he said in 2002, “one of us has been walking through Grand Central.” Another commuter, Herbert Askwith of Larchmont, was responsible for single-handedly nudging the railroad to set its clocks and timetables to daylight time.
Commuting can foster a real camaraderie as fellow passengers celebrate passages into other life stages—people have been born and married in Grand Central and others have died there—or just enjoy a poker game or holiday cheer. By the middle of the 1930s, the impact of the Depression was beginning to fade, at least for well-heeled commuters from New Canaan, Connecticut. They petitioned the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad to restore the club car on the 5:12 from Grand Central with its white-coated attendant. “We’re not rich men,” said George H. Yuengling, an insurance broker. “We’re all hard working fellows who like relaxation and are willing to pay a little extra to avoid the discomforts of ordinary commuting.”
Bill Geist, the CBS television commentator, once recalled the Christmas party on Car No. 8657 on the New Haven’s 5:20 from Grand Central to Westport. Regulars decorated the car and hired a six-piece band. Habitués of bar cars are no different from colleagues stopping at a saloon on the way home, except they are more likely to be excused for wobbling between stations.
A whole genre—stragglers who miss the last train before the terminal closes at 2 a.m.—has developed a culture of stranded “train wrecks,” some of whom wash away their tears in a local bar or offer themselves up as “Cinderella fares” to lucky cabbies. (In cold weather, one door on 42nd Street is staffed by a police officer who lets stragglers and the homeless into a makeshift lobby.) In 1932, Norman L. Holmes of Danbury was so determined not to miss his train home that he stole an ambulance from St. Vincent’s Hospital and drove it to Grand Central with its siren wailing (he crashed into a parked car on 44th Street and was arrested).
Other commuters managed happier endings. One man, a 65-year-old lawyer from Queens who had no choice but to stand on a crowded train from Grand Central to White Plains, won a jury verdict against the New York Central of $11.80—a refund of his $1.80 fare plus $10 in damages for “discomfort.” That was in 1947, and his victory before a civil court judge was his second against the railroad. A decade earlier, he sued the New York Central because he was forced to stand on a train to Albany and won a precedent-setting verdict (a $2.80 refund and $45 for discomfort) that established the principle that passengers who purchased tickets for long-distance trains had to be guaranteed a seat.
Walter S. Titlar, an insurance man who had been commuting from Ossining to Manhattan for three months short of a half century, reaped his own reward after piling up 750,000 miles on the Hudson line. (When he started as a messenger for Metropolitan Life, his $7.20 monthly commutation fare was higher than his $5 weekly salary. When he retired at 65, he was making $300 a week and paying $30.95 for his monthly commute.) In 1961, Titlar donned a visored cap and fulfilled a 50-year boyhood dream, riding beside the engineer in the locomotive of the 5:22 from Grand Central.
IN 1987, PHILIPPE PETIT MARKED GRAND CENTRAL’S 75TH ANNIVERSARY BY WALKING 80 FEET ABOVE THE CONCOURSE, WITHOUT A NET.
SECRETS OF GRAND CENTRAL
STAND IN THE MIDDLE of Grand Central’s Main Concourse and you are surrounded by secrets: a hidden staircase a few feet away that, no matter how hard you look, you can’t see; a 25,728-square-foot mistake; a lesser aberration that can barely be measured in inches; an underground room so vital during World War II that any unauthorized visitor might be shot; a hole in one corner of the ceiling and a small dark patch in another; special places to whisper and to kiss; why the departure times on the digital train boards are always wrong; a command post on a floor that, according to the elevator buttons, does not exist; and an existing but secluded railroad siding where even the chairman of Metro-North’s parent, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, was warned away by armed guards.
Let’s begin with the easy ones, and some of the oddities you may have noticed before and always wondered about.
WHY DOES SUCH AN ELEGANT BUILDING HAVE SO MANY BARE LIGHTBULBS?
When Grand Central opened in 1913, gaslight was still the norm in many places. The New York Central and the Vanderbilts were showing off. Not only had its trains been converted to electricity, but its entire new terminal was electric. What better way to dramatize modern technology, railroad officials figured, than to expose the bulbs themselves? And if you’re wondering how many people it takes to change every lightbulb in Grand Central, the answer is six: about 4,000 bulbs in public areas were switched from incandescent to compact fluorescent bulbs in 2008.
AM I GETTING SQUIRRELLY, OR ARE THERE DECORATIVE ACORNS ALL OVER THE TERMINAL?
The Vanderbilts came from modest stock and, sorry to say, had no family crest. Commodore Vanderbilt adopted the acorn (from which mighty oaks grow) and oak leaves as a Vanderbilt emblem. They adorn some of the terminal’s light fixtures and friezes (as well as semiprecious mosaics in the Billiard Room of The Breakers, the Vanderbilt family mansion in Newport, Rhode Island; the seal and various other artifacts at Vanderbilt University, which the Commodore endowed; and the crest of Silliman College at Yale, which was built with a gift from Frederick W. Vanderbilt). The terminal’s acorns and oak leaves, the architect John Belle observed, are as discreet as “Ninas” in an Al Hirschfeld caricature.