If you've wandered near any New York City media this week you've likely seen that today is the 100th birthday of Grand Central Terminal (see it then). Earlier this month, our own Andy Dallos was invited to take a tour that included some of the less familiar locations in the building.
No matter where you live, you're probably already familiar with the main concourse, but did you know there's a control room?
A couple more after the jump...
What about the secret basement more than ten stories underground, housing electrical transformers and breakers?
That's Dan Brucker, manager of Grand Central tours.
This wasn't part of the tour but more like a lucky coincidence that Andy was in the right place at the right time. Those are the melon chandeliers that usually hang high from the ceiling but are lowered for cleaning and bulb changes.
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One of my favorite places in the world. I used to muse that there it was possible to do pretty much everything you'd ever do in life, without seeing daylight. You could live at the Roosevelt Hotel, work in the Pan Am building (as my father did), shop in the arcade, recreate (even play tennis) at the Vanderbilt Athletic Club, see movies, eat in any of a dozen restaurants (including the Oyster Bar, where Manhattan Clam Chowder was invented), and even go to the "park" (just sit on a bench and people-watch). One of the great cathedrals of mid-20th-century "metropolitanism."
Thanks for these. Stepping off the train platform and into the main concourse for the first time as a high school senior made such an impression on me that I came back after college and stayed for twenty years or so. Just magical.
Pity they run all the Amtrak trains through Penn Station now.
Note the overall theme of a Century of the Grand idea of improving the nation's infrastructure.
Just browse through the enlarged picture:
See the green energy used for local transportation, today we address that problem using stopped traffic on streets choked with congestion using information resources informing us of the problem, we just don't see it, the very solution that dominates the excavated landscape.
To the right we can see U.S. Mail cars that once supported the commerce across the entire nation, today we are still struggling to find any solution to the U.S. Postal Service a problem made insolvable by Congress and commercial greed.
In this one picture we can see in the buildings the effects of the iron to steel revolution, steel mined and produced in the U.S. then, today we depend to a great degree on imported steel, sending our own scrap across the ocean for remanufacturing.
In the wood beams used to support the roads for ongoing and existing business, today we have largely harvested those forests, and largely neglected to plant new trees, trees that would have grown large since that time are largely missing, so on to the larger world to remove those trees as well. Still we cannot see the large picture, a picture made clearer on by more trees!
Those steam powered shovel's cousins went on to build the Panama Canal, and have since grown to mountain topping proportions, as they flatten the Earth for the Flat Earth political movement.
Down and to the left, we see a steel blasting mat used to cover rock sections being blasted, while overtime the man's head gear styles have change, this one seems to foretell who now owns much of the United States and continues to set the standard for explosives.
In just two more years Pennsylvania Station (1910) followed, it suffered a different fate, a causality to modernity, and did not survive to inspire imaging of future times.