Grand Central Terminal

Where it sits. The terminal fills the blocks between 42nd and 45th Streets where Park Avenue would otherwise run, and the avenue is carried around it on a viaduct. Above and beside it stand the towers of what the New York Central Railroad called Terminal City, built on air rights over the buried tracks, including the Chrysler Building two blocks east and the MetLife Building directly behind. Below ground, 44 platforms and 67 tracks are arranged on two levels, more than any other railway station in the world, with a third and much deeper level, Grand Central Madison, opened for Long Island Rail Road trains in 2023.

The story behind it. A collision in the smoke-filled Park Avenue Tunnel in 1902 killed seventeen people and forced the railroad to abandon steam in Manhattan. Electrification made it possible to sink the approach tracks below ground, roof them over and sell the resulting real estate, which paid for everything else. The present building, designed by Reed and Stem for its circulation and by Warren and Wetmore for its Beaux-Arts dress, opened on 2 February 1913. Its most radical idea is invisible to most users: ramps instead of stairs almost everywhere, so that a passenger with luggage can move between street, concourse and platform without lifting anything.

What to look at. The Main Concourse measures roughly 275 by 120 feet with a vaulted ceiling 125 feet up, painted with a Mediterranean winter sky to a design by the French artist Paul César Helleu and executed by Charles Basing. The constellations are reversed, a mistake explained variously as a medieval manuscript source or as the view from outside the celestial sphere. A dark rectangle near the crab was deliberately left unwashed during the restoration completed in the 1990s to show the tar and nicotine that had accumulated over eighty years, and a small hole in the ceiling survives from the erection of a Redstone missile in the concourse in 1957. Outside on 42nd Street, Jules-Félix Coutan's 1914 sculptural group of Mercury flanked by Hercules and Minerva surrounds a Tiffany glass clock some thirteen feet across. In the middle of the concourse the four-faced brass and opal clock on the information booth is the city's default meeting point. Outside the Oyster Bar, which has traded since the terminal opened, the Guastavino tile vaults of the Whispering Gallery carry a murmur diagonally from one corner to the other.

On screen. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority hosts roughly twenty-five large productions a year here, and one practical detail governs almost all of them: nearly every scene shot in the train shed is filmed on Track 34, one of the few platforms without columns interrupting the sightlines. In North by Northwest (1959) Roger Thornhill buys a ticket and boards the Twentieth Century Limited from these platforms. The Fisher King (1991) contains the terminal's best-known sequence, in which the rush-hour crowd on the concourse floor breaks into a waltz. Carlito's Way (1993) ends with a chase through the terminal and up its escalators. The exterior on 42nd Street was used for the New York battle in The Avengers (2012). Elizabeth Smart borrowed the name for a novel in 1945, Salinger's Holden Caulfield checks his bags here, and the terminal's machine rooms and clocks fed The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011). Since 2003 the Saturday Night Live stage in Studio 8H has been a reconstruction of the concourse. One frequent misattribution: the pram bouncing down the steps in The Untouchables (1987) was filmed at Chicago's Union Station, not here.

Why it still stands. Pennsylvania Station was demolished in 1963, and the loss produced the city's landmarks law. When the terminal's owners proposed a tower above it, a preservation campaign in which Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was the most visible figure fought the case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the landmarks law in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City in 1978. Everything visible today exists because that case was won.

Getting there and timing. The 4, 5, 6, 7 and S all stop beneath the terminal; Metro-North serves Westchester, Connecticut and the Hudson Valley from the upper level. Entry is free and the building never really closes. Mid-morning on a weekday gives you the concourse without the crush; the balconies on the east and west sides are the places to stand for the classic elevated view. The lower-level dining concourse, the market on the Lexington Avenue side and the Campbell bar, built as a private office in the 1920s, are all worth the detour.