Grand Central Terminal — railway station
Image by jplenio from Pixabay

Grand Central Terminal

  • 2 min read
  • 40.753° N 73.977° W

Interesting facts

  • The constellations on the Main Concourse ceiling are largely painted back to front; a commuter noticed the mistake in 1913, and it has never been corrected.
  • A private siding beneath the Waldorf Astoria, Track 61, let Franklin D. Roosevelt's car drive off his train into a hotel lift, hiding his paralysis from the public.
  • Carved acorns and oak leaves appear throughout the building because the acorn was the Vanderbilt family emblem; a brass acorn even crowns the famous concourse clock.
  • The T in the interlocking GCT monogram is shaped like an upside-down anchor, a nod to Cornelius Vanderbilt's beginnings in steamships and ferries.
  • The faces of the information-booth clock are opalescent glass; the popular story that they are precious opal worth millions is a debunked myth.
  • In 1968 a police officer's bullet cracked one of the clock's four faces during a protest; the damaged original now belongs to the New York Transit Museum.
  • A deadly 1902 crash in the smoke-filled Park Avenue Tunnel led New York to ban steam trains in Manhattan, prompting an all-electric, fully underground terminal.
  • Builders excavated about 2.4 million cubic metres of rock and earth, up to ten storeys deep, with more than 10,000 workers, while trains kept running throughout.
  • From 1939 to 1964 CBS ran television studios above the waiting room, and Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts challenging Senator Joseph McCarthy went out from there.
  • Some 30 metres below the Graybar Building lies M42, an electrical substation that was the largest in the world when it opened in 1930.

Why it is worth it

Grand Central Terminal is a commuter station that became one of the most visited buildings in the world: some 21 million people came in 2018 just to look, not counting passengers. It stands at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and opened in 1913, the third station of that name on the site, built by the New York Central Railroad. With 44 platforms serving 67 tracks on two underground levels, it has more platforms than any other station on earth, and at the morning peak a train arrives about every minute.

All the platforms lie below ground, and the Beaux-Arts station house above them, planned by Reed and Stem with Whitney Warren of Warren and Wetmore, became the centre of a new business district built over the tracks. On the 42nd Street façade, Jules-Félix Coutan's sculptural group The Glory of Commerce, with Mercury flanked by Hercules and Minerva, spreads 15 metres wide around a great clock. Inside, the Main Concourse covers some 3,300 square metres beneath a green-blue ceiling painted as a night sky with its constellations; at its centre, the information booth is topped by a four-faced brass clock, the building's most recognisable symbol and the city's classic meeting point.

The terminal is full of smaller pleasures. Where a bridge crosses the ramps down to the Oyster Bar, the arches beneath it form a whispering gallery: stand in one corner and you can hear someone murmur in the diagonally opposite one. Vanderbilt Hall, the former waiting room, hosts exhibitions and each January a glass-walled squash court for a professional tournament. Beneath the Metro-North tracks, Grand Central Madison, opened in 2023, brought Long Island Rail Road trains into the complex.

Grand Central nearly did not survive. In 1968 the bankrupt railroad's successor, Penn Central, proposed demolishing it for an office tower, as had already happened to Pennsylvania Station. The city's landmarks commission refused to consider the plans, and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in favour of the city. A restoration completed in 1998 stripped out decades of advertising and cleaned the ceiling to reveal the painted sky again.

Getting there

The terminal is in Midtown Manhattan, less than 1 km from Times Square. The Grand Central–42nd Street subway station is directly connected, and Metro-North trains run from here to the Hudson Valley and Connecticut. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is about 9 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in New York 17The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Buildings Seen on Screen in the United States 6The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings in the United States 11The Most Beautiful Railway Stations 22The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the United States 24The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United States 34The Most Beautiful Buildings Seen on Screen 47The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings 50The Most Beautiful Film Locations 221The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

Grand Central Terminal is a commuter rail terminal at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Grand Central is the southern terminus of the Metro-North Railroad's Harlem, Hudson and New Haven Lines, serving the northern parts of the New York metropolitan area. It also serves the Long Island Rail Road through Grand Central Madison, a 16-acre (6.5 ha) addition to the station located underneath the Metro-North tracks, built from 2007 to 2023. The terminal also connects to the New York City Subway at the Grand Central–42nd Street station. The terminal is the third-busiest train station in North America, after New York Penn Station and Toronto Union Station.

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