Grand Central Terminal, also referred to as Grand Central Station or simply as Grand Central, is a commuter rail terminal located 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 contains a connection to the New York City Subway at Grand Central-42nd Street station. The terminal is the second-busiest train station in North America, after New York Penn Station.
The distinctive architecture and interior design of Grand Central Terminal's station house have earned it several landmark designations, including as a National Historic Landmark. Its Beaux-Arts design incorporates numerous works of art.
Grand Central Terminal is one of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions, with 21.6 million visitors in 2018, excluding train and subway passengers. The terminal's Main Concourse is often used as a meeting place, and is especially featured in films and television.
Grand Central Terminal contains a variety of stores and food vendors, including upscale restaurants and bars, two food halls, and a grocery marketplace.
Grand Central Terminal was built by and named for the New York Central Railroad; it also served the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and, later, successors to the New York Central.
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Opened in 1913, the terminal was built on the site of two similarly-named predecessor stations, the first of which dates to 1871. Grand Central Terminal served intercity trains until 1991, when Amtrak began routing its trains through nearby Penn Station. The East Side Access project, which will bring Long Island Rail Road service to a new station beneath the terminal, is expected to be completed in late 2022.
Grand Central covers 19 ha and has 44 platforms, more than any other railroad station in the world. Its platforms, all below ground, serve 30 tracks on the upper level and 26 on the lower.
In total, there are 67 tracks, including a rail yard and sidings; of these, 43 tracks are in use for passenger service, while the remaining two dozen are used to store trains. Another eight tracks and four platforms are being built on two new levels deep underneath the existing station as part of East Side Access.
Grand Central Terminal was named by and for the New York Central Railroad, which built the station and its two predecessors on the site. It has always been more colloquially and affectionately known as Grand Central Station, the name of its immediate predecessor that operated from 1900 to 1910.
The name Grand Central Station is also shared with the nearby U.S. Post Office station at 450 Lexington Avenue and, colloquially, with the Grand Central-42nd Street subway station next to the terminal.
Grand Central Terminal was designed and built with two main levels for passengers: an upper for intercity trains and a lower for commuter trains. This configuration, devised by New York Central vice president William J. Wilgus, separated intercity and commuter-rail passengers, smoothing the flow of people in and through the station. After intercity service ended in 1991, the upper level was renamed the Main Concourse and the lower the Dining Concourse.
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The original plan for Grand Central's interior was designed by Reed and Stem, with some work by Whitney Warren of Warren and Wetmore.
Grand Central Terminal was designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Reed and Stem, which was responsible for the overall design of the terminal, and Warren and Wetmore, which mainly made cosmetic alterations to the exterior and interior. Various elements inside the terminal were designed by French architects and artists Jules-Félix Coutan, Sylvain Salières, and Paul César Helleu.
Grand Central has both monumental spaces and meticulously crafted detail, especially on its facade. The facade is based on an overall exterior design by Whitney Warren.
The terminal is widely recognized and favorably viewed by the American public. In America's Favorite Architecture, a 2006-07 public survey by the American Institute of Architects, respondents ranked it their 13th-favorite work of architecture in the country, and their fourth-favorite in the city and state after the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and St. Patrick's Cathedral.
In 2013, historian David Cannadine described it as one of the most majestic buildings of the twentieth century. The terminal is also recognized by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, added in 2013.
As proposed in 1904, Grand Central Terminal was bounded by Vanderbilt Avenue to the west, Lexington Avenue to the east, 42nd Street to the south, and 45th Street to the north. It included a post office on its east side. The east side of the station house proper is an alley called Depew Place, which was built along with the Grand Central Depot annex in the 1880s and mostly decommissioned in the 1900s when the new terminal was built.
The station house measures 240 m along Vanderbilt Avenue, 91 m on 42nd Street, and 32 m tall.
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They said it was to give the perspective of God,
but they'd simply hired a bunch of drunks.
M.E. Henry Morgan
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