NYC Grand Central Terminal 100 yrs today

Sat

Feb 2 2013

08:49 am

By: bizgrrl shortURL

Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913 and is the world's largest terminal covering 49 acres with 33 miles of track. Each day 700,000 people pass through the terminal where Metro-North Railroad operates 700 trains per day.

In an NPR interview, the Grand Central Terminal anniversary was discussed. New York Times reporter Sam Roberts has written a book about the terminal, "Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America."

Grand Central Terminal
Grand Central Terminal, Wikipedia style

Note, "The oldest sections of the London Underground completed 150 years of operations on 10 January 2013."

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My friend Steve Brown posted

Submitted by redmondkr on Sat, 2013/02/02 - 12:27pm.

My friend Steve Brown posted this photo he took at the terminal a few days after completion of its restoration back in 1998.

Click the Flickr photo to see it in a lightbox.

I think there's an Apple

Submitted by michael kaplan on Sat, 2013/02/02 - 1:33pm.
(in reply to redmondkr)

I think there's an Apple Store now on that balcony.

Such a beautiful structure.

Submitted by Min on Sat, 2013/02/02 - 8:28pm.
(in reply to michael kaplan)

This picture made me go looking for more, and I stumbled upon the controversy surrounding the demolition of Penn Station in the 60's. It is a shame that NY could not preserve both stations. Penn Station was perhaps even more glorious, in its own way, than Grand Central.

Penn didn't quite have the

Submitted by michael kaplan on Sat, 2013/02/02 - 9:21pm.
(in reply to Min)

Penn didn't quite have the warmth and (in spite of its scale) intimacy of Grand Central. I photographed the interior of Penn a few years before it was demolished and will try to dig out those images ...

The crazy thing (as Jack Neely has recently written) is that we're still tearing down old buildings. The most notorious example is the mission house that Steve Jobs owned and had demolished - over the protests of local preservationists.

So .. we can all thank Jackie Kennedy for leading the battle to save Grand Central from demolition.

Does anybody else remember

Submitted by Rachel on Sat, 2013/02/02 - 7:37pm.

Does anybody else remember the dance scene in "The Fisher King?"

*

Submitted by Tamara Shepherd on Sat, 2013/02/02 - 9:37pm.

I ushered the family up to Cincinnati this past Labor Day weekend and had great fun introducing them to the city's Riverfest celebration and its beautiful Union Terminal building.

The Art Deco-style Terminal has been reclaimed in recent years as the Cincinnati Museum Center and now houses three museums and an IMAX theater.

Thankfully, renovators didn't touch its gorgeous rotunda, in which a 360-degree mural depicting the city's history is painted.

The family was as interested in the visit as I'd hoped they'd be--and as awed as I was, when I first viewed it some 30 years ago.

it's a fabulous building, a

Submitted by michael kaplan on Sat, 2013/02/02 - 11:11pm.
(in reply to Tamara Shepherd)

it's a fabulous building, a great example of the kind of synergy that results from mixing uses.

Tennessee pink marble

Submitted by barkers (not verified) on Sun, 2013/02/03 - 12:02pm.

The marble used throughout Grand Central came from Blount County. When the second massive stairway was installed on the east side of the Grand Concourse in the 1990s (it was in the original design but not included when Grand Central was initially built) New York officials used marble from the same quarry. Tennessee Marble Co.