Walt Lockley

Grand Central Terminal as a Big Nothing

In the middle of the Grand Central Terminal there's a big nothing - two big nothings actually, two matching nothings, one volumetric nothing suspended in midair, and another flat-surface nothing spread out on the pavement. Together those two nothings make Grand Central Terminal possible. All this much nothing in the hyperdense, viciously-warred-over, multi-stacked, priced-by-the-fractional-inch landscape of Manhattan is itself remarkable. Nothing quite gets your attention like nothing in this context, because you know that nothing is an expensive luxury in Manhattan.

Nothing is worthy of study because, not only is this building a Beaux Arts masterpiece, one of the quintessential Manhattan experiences, maybe the finest and most public-spirited architectural experience available in New York City, not only is it filled with drama and life and tangible municipal history, Grand Central Terminal also happens to serve its purpose with supreme elegance and efficiency. It works. It is handsome, yes, but it's a buono machina as well as bello.

Something like 30,000 commuters arrive every day; something like half a million pedestrians pass through the building every day, with a minimum of confusion, few collisions, and a much lower level of stress than seems possible. Coming up on its 100th birthday it's a living triumph of traffic management and social engineering - especially when compared to its handy bete noire, its evil twin, Pennsylvania Station. It works because it was made that way, made to work, by whiskered masters of the craft. Grand Central Terminal is an Edwardian ideal, a grand machine with humane purpose and no moving parts, silently explaining itself to each new stranger, using its 500,000 daily patrons' own energy to redistribute themselves.

How?

Orientation. The Terminal itself lets its users know where they are. Both the exterior shape of Grand Central Terminal and the main room are strongly defined, obvious cubes aligned with compass points. In orientation it's perfectly aligned with the street grid. It's extremely easy to orient yourself. The central, circular information booth marks the locus. If this seems trivial, consider Penn Station, an underground warren not easily held in the mind, not imaginable as geometric solids. Or consider a regional shopping mall, a mantrap deliberately designed to take away your bearings in hopes that you'll buy more merchandise to take your mind off being lost.

"Wayfinding" is the act of figuring out where you're going. For first-time users in a train station or hospital, wayfinding can be a major waste of time. The modern solution to this is to put up a lot of signs, or icons, or color-coded stripes on the floor. The Beaux-Arts solution was to give Grand Central Terminal spatial logic and clarity, make it a three-dimensional index to itself, and let the shapes, surfaces, steps, arches, ramps and passageways inherent in the structure speak for themselves.

William D. Middleton writes (in "Grand Central… the World's Greatest Railway Terminal", an illustrated appreciation published in 1977), "It was said… that a barrel released through one of the doors on 42nd Street would roll smoothly down the ramp and come to a stop on the concourse in front of a ticket window." Even if not exactly true, that's exactly right. To navigate down into the main floor from 42nd Street you have to be as smart as a barrel.

The Grand Concourse is a surprisingly deep 16 feet below street level. When you get there, it somehow seems level with the street, or close, which adds to a wonderful sort of trompe l'oeil discovered-space effect when you sense the Grand Concourse floor stretching out to the east, underground, beyond the exterior footprint of the building. Even after you know how this trick works, this sense of magically expanded space is still mysterious and liberating.

Once on the main floor, you have obvious choices. If you want information, the direct route would be to stop at the circular information booth which stands in the exact locus of the building, it's unavoidable. If you have a moment to survey the scene, you'll choose a balcony.

You'll walk. You have the gift of space and the leisure to sort yourself out. Unlike the maddening stutter-dance you'll do in the underground collision chamber of Penn Station, here you can see and anticipate the speed and direction of all these skilled pedestrians around you. You sense and use, but probably are not aware of, various subtle spatial codes in the marble paving about pace and distance, proportion and perspective. The paving relates to human scale in specific ways.

The balconies (broad observation galleries, actually) wrap around three sides of the main space, allowing you to survey the space, observe the entire dance, before joining it. The faces of the perimeter walls contain a good deal of information, some of it in English. There's a consistent language just in the arches, their height and width and depth and number and orientation, that wordlessly signal how many people are expected to flow through them. Same with the staircases. Examine the labeled arches, in big block letters legible from the other end of the building. Unlike the morally talkative messages on the outside of Rockefeller Center about Wisdom and Hygiene and Thought, ("Wisdom and Knowledge Shall Be the Stability of Thy Time"), these messages are more like "TRACKS 100 - 117" and "LEXINGTON AVE" and "SUBWAY & 42nd STREET".

Lastly, circulation. Once you've decided where you are, and where you should go next, you decide how to get there.

The ramps in this building are the most-often-pointed-to aspect of the mysterious genius of the building. The ramps are oversold, I think. It's interesting to know those long, gentle ramps are an artifact of the original engineering-oriented design architects Reed and Stem. (To be quick about the political history, Reed and Stem won the original competition, but the partnership of Wetmore (lawyer) and Warren (Beaux-Arts teacher) wormed their way in because Warren was related to Vanderbilt; Charles Reed died in 1911 and Wetmore quickly moved to control the entire commission; Allen Stem sued and was awarded $4 or $500,000 in 1920 dollars, and Warren got kicked out of the AIA.)

So the pedestrian ramps happily survived from the original design. To quote Middleton again: "Temporary ramps required during the early construction period were installed at different slopes, and the results carefully watched. From this the architects determined that a maximum satisfactory grade was about 10 percent, although those installed in the terminal varied anywhere from about 6 to 11 percent."

Yeah, the ramps are okay.

The single most important thing in Grand Central Terminal is the void in the middle of the room. People tend to not notice voids, I think, because they're not there. But they're important. One wonders how many retailers have stood on the lip of the kissing gallery, aching and moaning over the lost opportunity, lusting after all at that lovely blank acreage of Tennessee marble with exposure to the best foot traffic in the world, and figuring on bent fingers its potential in the way retailers count it -- sales per square foot. One source gives the dimensions of the main concourse at 470 x 160, which is 75,000 square feet. The ratio of sales-per-square-foot is the yardstick of the retail industry, and the annual sales-per-square-foot expected to break even in a suburban restaurant is about $200. That's gross floor space, including flow space and display space and back-office. For mall stores a good return is from $250 to $350, and a food court in a mall can bring in upwards of $630 per square foot. It goes without saying that Grand Central Terminal would be prime retail space, not only for the location and desirable demographics of the traffic (affluent commuters and international tourists, bullseye!) but also because it could leverage the friendly, warm ambience. So $400 annual return per square foot is a conservative reasonable guess. So if you allowed Grand Central Terminal to prostitute herself on the main floor, she would bring you back at least $30,000,000 a year. Some unnamed civic hero valued the public and civic social message of this room as worth more than $30,000,000 a year.

Unnamed civic hero, thank you.

Grand Central's role is practical / objective but verges over into the psychological / subjective. Psychologically it serves as a grand public space whose elegance and rhythm strongly conveys something about NYC and its history. It's a meeting place, tourist attraction, iconic, landmark (in the Kevin Lynch sense), cultural reference point, a historical building that's still supremely useful and (most important to me) a vivid demonstration that major civic architecture used to be humane and oriented to users.