March 1, 2021 • 35 mins
Grand Central's story starts with one of the wealthiest names in U.S. history, but it also is in many ways the story of the city itself since the 1800s, because Grand Central was such a pivotal element in the growth of Manhattan.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we're
a year into this pandemic almost at least in terms
(00:21):
of of places being locked down and travel restrictions happening.
And I really miss travel. I know that's like a
very privileging to miss, but I one of the things
I have really really been missing, and so is my husband,
has been New York. Um. Because prior to that, I
feel like I was getting to the point where I
was in New York once a month, and like, you know,
(00:43):
if it felt like second home for a while, I
would go to my usual fabric stores and they knew me,
and I would, you know, just tootle around New York
because I love it. UM. So I thought, to quell
my own wanderlust, it would be interesting to look at
the history of a place that is iconic to New
(01:03):
York UH, to try to help me cope with these feelings.
So I thought it would be fun to look at
the history of Grand Central Terminal as it started and evolved. Um.
This is a story that starts really with one of
the wealthiest names in US history. But it also kind
of becomes the story of the city itself, at least
(01:24):
since the mid eighteen hundreds, because Grand Central has been
such a pivotal element, as had the railroads in the
growth of Manhattan. So that's what we're covering today. In
the eighteen hundreds, New York was growing rapidly. We've talked
about this before, including in our episode on Seneca Village.
One of the big elements of the city's growth was
(01:46):
the development of railroads to connect the city to other
parts of the island of Manhattan and beyond. Three of
the major railroad companies that introduced lines in New York
City by the middle of the nineteenth century became the
drivers of the story of Grand Central. So the New
York and Harlem Railroad was chartered in eighteen thirty one,
(02:07):
and it initially ran tracks along Fourth Avenue that started
at twenty three Street and went all the way up
to the Harlem River. And then there were also eventually
branch tracks off of it that left that primary line
and kind of took left turns and stuff as well.
Keep in mind these were not yet steam engines. These
lines were carrying horse drawn cars at this point, and
(02:29):
then the Hudson River Railroad was established in eighteen forty
seven and ran, as the name suggests, along the Hudson
River for almost the length of the island. The New
York Central Railroad had formed in eighteen fifty three when
ten smaller railroads merged. Those railroads still exist today sort
of now they are part of the Metro North Railroad
(02:51):
company owned by the Umbrella company that has more name recognition.
That's Metropolitan Transit Authority or mt A. Yep, when you
see people tweeting about their MTA trains, it's all related
all the way back to the eighteen hundreds, and the
beginning of the consolidation of those three lines is thanks
to Cornelia's Vanderbilt. Today, the Vanderbilt name is associated with wealth,
(03:15):
but when Cornelius was born on nine four on Staten Island,
his family lived in poverty. Cornelius only went to school
until he was eleven because after that he had to
focus on earning money for the family, working alongside his
father on the docks as part of his father's ferry service.
When he was sixteen, Cornelius Vanderbilt bought his first boat.
(03:38):
Sometimes this is also reported as being two boats, and
he started his own ferrying service, carrying people from Staten
Island to New York City. And while he ran the
business on his own, he had gotten a loan from
his parents for the purchase, so he shared his profits
with them. From that small beginning, he built a fleet,
taking advantage of the War of eighteen twelve to eight
(04:00):
span so that he could carry needed supplies to various
outposts through a government contract. So he made some money
from this enterprise, and he sold his little armada just
eight years into this ferry business and became a captain
award a steamship. That seems weird, and he spent eleven
years in that role, and then in nine he kind
(04:21):
of goes back to his roots of being an entrepreneur
because he parlayed his expertise in steamships that he had
gained to start his own steamship company, once again offering
ferry service, but this time in a much more upscale
fashion to his previous first company's offering. And he was
fairly cutthroat when it came to his competitors. That's the
kindest way I can put that. He lowered his fares
(04:44):
to the point that he pushed other New York ferry
services into a corner they were going to go out
of business because they could not compete, and they eventually
paid him just to move his business to another market.
Then he shifted his company's roots to run some Massachusetts
and Rhode Island from Long Island along the Hudson River,
and his wealth continued to grow at this point, just exponentially.
(05:07):
He eventually expanded his shipping business two routes that included
New Orleans and then the US West Coast via passage
through Nicaragua, which was shorter and faster than the one
through Panama that most of his competitors were using. Once again,
he pushed his competition to the brink of ruin and
then cut a deal so that they could pay him
(05:27):
to cease operations, which they did. Uh. You might have
gathered from this that Vanderbilt was kind of a business
genius but also a real jerk in most ways. Uh.
This fleet of steamboats that he amassed earned him the
nickname commodore. Yeah, and a lot of those dealings, I
mean he's getting paid to not work like he's like,
(05:48):
you will pay me and then pay me an annual
stipend to continue to not compete with you, which is,
as I said, cutthroat is the nicest way I can
put it. After he left the shipping industry, Vanderbilt turned
his eye to railroads, which at this point he was
starting to see us having far more potential for growth
than shipping trust. We're leaving out a lot of stuff
(06:11):
here about his various ongoing feuds with other people, but
at this point he started purchasing stock in the New
York and Harlem Railroad, and he continued to do so
until he kind of cornered the market and then owned
the line that was in sixty three. By eighteen sixty nine,
he had also taken control of the Hudson River Railroad
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and the New York Central Railroad, and the acquisition of
the New York Central Railroad was downright ruthless. He had
refused to take passengers from the New York Central Line
onto his other railroads as connections during the winter, when
the path along the Erie Canal that Central would have
normally used was frozen over. So this meant that both
(06:53):
freight and passengers were cut off and isolated, and to
quell the growing unrest and difficulty, the Central Railroad at.
As a consequence, the New York Central Railroad sold control
of the company to Vanderbilt just to get everything moving again.
One of the ways that Vanderbilt had outmaneuvered his competition
throughout his career was by having capital on hand before
(07:15):
starting a new venture, whether it was ships or railroads.
He was able to undercut marketplace cost to the consumer
because he had enough to not have to jack up
his prices to keep the business afloat. Simultaneously, he invested
large portions of his capital into infrastructure, so he was
upgrading his businesses, many of which had been struggling when
(07:39):
he acquired them, to then make them more profitable. Yeah. Basically,
he could take the time to make the investment and
take an initial loss and then be like, look, my
line is way more luxurious and I'm charging way less
than the other guys, and of course everyone would flock
to that. Uh. This consolidation that he created with the
railroads started a number of industry standards in the US
(08:03):
based on rules that Vanderbilt insisted on. For one, all
of his railroad employees were a uniform. For another, he
instituted the policy that tickets had to be punched before boarding.
This is not, to be clear a situation where Vanderbilt
invented these practices. They were already standard procedure in Britain.
For example, he actually modeled a lot of his trained
(08:25):
business on the way Britain managed their trains, but he
just integrated them into US business and made them the standard.
So in terms of connecting various locations to each other,
these rail lines were pretty great, and Vanderbilt was making
a lot of money. But there was also the very
real problem of pollution. New Yorkers did not like all
(08:48):
the soot that came with trains in the city. As
a consequence, the city ordinance had been issued in eighteen
fifty four that banned steam engines from traveling south of Street.
If you were in the city lower than that, you
would only see horse drawn conveyances. Yes, the trains would
all stop at forty two, passengers would switch over to carriages,
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and that's how they would get around in the southern
part of Manhattan Island. And again that that ordinance happened
before he really got like huge into into trains. But
naturally he saw this and wanted to extend his railroad service,
and he also wanted to make it easier to coordinate
among the three railroads that he now owned, so he
(09:31):
was at the start of eighteen sixty nine running lines
with two separate terminals. He did not have a freight
complex for the Hudson Line, and so his approach of
developing infrastructure was that whole thing where he would like
use his money to build it up. Was what led
Vanderbilt to construct the Grand Central Depot starting in eighteen
sixty nine. The decision was to build a transit hub
(09:55):
at forty two Street that all three lines could use
on a tract of land in the St. John's Park neighborhood.
This project, which was known as the Grand Central Depost,
started in eighteen sixty nine. The face of the structure
on Street was two nine feet wide and extended north
to east forty Street. The land that the railroad did
(10:18):
not already own was purchased by Vanderbilt, once again through
his use of pressure. Oh he loved to pressure people
to give him what he wanted, uh So in eighteen
fifty again. Way before this, the General Railroad Law of
New York State had established a rule regarding land that
Vanderbilt was happy to exploit when it came time to
(10:39):
do so. So, in an effort to foster growth and infrastructure,
via this law, the railroads have been given the power
to appropriate land and then have its value assessed by
the court system. So basically say, hey, person, I need
your land. The court's gonna tell us what it's worth,
and I'll pay you that. And though there was at
(11:00):
least one offer by a landholder to lease Vanderbilt his property,
instead of selling, the tycoon insisted that he always bought
and never leased, and he was able to acquire the
plot in question, as well as every other tract of
land that he needed for his project. Many of these
assessments were likely at far lower prices than they should
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have been, thanks to the various connections that Vanderbilt had
two people in power, which he was again perfectly happy
to massage and manipulate. In the end, Grand Central Depot
cost Cornelius Vanderbilt six point four million dollars was designed
by architect John B. Snook and it opened on November one, one,
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so estimating that six point four million dollar value today
puts it at more than a hundred and forty million dollars.
It had five elevated platforms, five mansward roofs tower in
honor of each of the three railroad companies that came
together there. It had a sixty thousand square foot glass roof,
offering passengers a sense of grandeur as they boarded and
(12:07):
made their transfers. Whistles and bells were not allowed inside
the train shed, so it was surprisingly quiet. I will
say at this point that the use of the phrase
train shed always cracks me up when looking at these
historical things, because I think of a shed as a
small structure in your backyard. But these were I mean,
this was like the train version of Paxton's Crystal Palace.
(12:28):
It was huge, and it's where all the trains came
through and all of the passengers boarding. So we're gonna
talk about the reaction to Vanderbilt's new train depot and
how it evolved after we first paused for a sponsor break.
So once it opened, some journalists downplayed Vanderbilt's depot as
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being neither central nor grand uh and one writer actually
called it end of the world station. Part of the
criticism here came from the logistical arrangement of the station,
so inbound trains arrived on the east side of the
so called shed, and outbound trains exited on the west
side at that meant that trains needed to sometimes cross
each other's paths north of the station, so it created
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kind of a weird traffic tangle. Also, even though this
was spacious, sometimes passenger traffic caused log jams of people
as the passengers tried to navigate through the platforms. And
dozens of trains came and went through the facility every day,
and each railroad line had a separate waiting room, so
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for people who had to do their transfer with luggage,
this was an especially trying or deal. Still, the depot
had its bans, with the New York Herald calling it
quote the finest passenger railroad depot in the world. In
eighteen seventy two, increased demand for more tracks led to
complaints that the train tracks were already creating huge swaths
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of unsafe areas as crossing multiple tracks which was necessary
to traverse certain parts of the city on foot or
in vehicles, that you were putting yourself in danger almost
every time, especially as the traffic load increased on those tracks.
In a letter to the New York Times, one resident wrote, quote,
there is no single thing on New York Island so
(14:16):
dangerous to the community and prejudicial to its interests as
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, which cuts the
city into its entire length and stretches unpaved, ungraded, and
is given over to the hundreds of locomotives that continually
dash up and down through the richest district of New York.
This led Vanderbilt to run sunken tracks with bridges in
(14:38):
place for pedestrians to safely pass over them. For seeing
that the same problem would crop up in other neighborhoods
north of this main area of complaint, he also made
arrangements to tunnel through the rock below the city streets
up to tracks were sunk underground up to the Harlem River.
In eighteen sixty nine, a sculpture of Commodore Vanderbilt by
(15:01):
sculptor Ernst Plasman was commissioned by one of Vanderbilt's associates,
Albert DeGroot, and was erected downtown at one of his
his older train depots. I believe this bronze statue is
reported as costing eight hundred thousand dollars, but for all
of that money, the reviews of it were really not good.
Lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong wrote of the statue
(15:24):
quote as a work of art, it is beast youll
you can decide for yourself if you're in New York.
That statue still exists, but it now sits at the
south facade of the Grand Central Terminal. De Groot had
been planning a second statue specifically for Grand Central Depot,
and Vanderbilt had even had architects Snook create a space
for it, but the poor reception to the first one
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caused them to reconsider. Cornelius Vanderbilt died in eighteen seventy seven,
but his son William, who inherited most of his father's
businesses and money, and then William's sons, continued to run
the depost successfully for more than twenty more years, and
in a way, vanderbilt success in normalizing train travel for
New York also led to the downfall of his Grand
(16:07):
Central Depot. Train commuting became so commonplace that demands sword,
which meant that the depot really was no longer big
enough to handle the required traffic for the city. In
nineteen hundred, there were one point eight million people in
New York City and Grand Central depot, which at that
point was just thirty years old, was already considered woefully
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outdated for what the city needed. There had been an
effort to expand the facility a couple of years earlier
that included an exterior transformation to a Neo Renaissance style.
That renovation had built the structure up, adding several floors.
In nine hundred, another round of renovation started that reorganized
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the layout of the depot, which by then was already
being called Grand Central Station. The separate waiting rooms were
combined into one large space. A women only waiting room
and retiring room was created, and then another waiting room
was added underground for lower class passengers that they would
not crowd the main waiting area. And yes, I would
(17:12):
not even call it thinly veiled. This is a pretty
over way of relegating the poor immigrant community into a
waiting room in the basement. Yeah, there's actually a company
executive I think who is like basically made this statement
to the papers that was like, don't worry. You can
come to the station and you won't see poor people
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to upset you on your travels. It's a little it's
super ikey um. New tunnels for trains had also been
added by this point, and while these tunnels were vented,
they still filled with steam and smoke regularly. This of
course impacted visibility. You can see where it's going. And
on January eighth, nineteen o two, the horrible but inevitable
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finally happened. That is an incident that is now own
as the Park Avenue crash. This collision happened because an
engineer running an express train from White Plains just couldn't
see the signal that indicated that another train was up ahead.
The express rear ended a commuter train. Fifteen people died
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instantly and dozens more were badly injured. The engineer, John Whisker,
was arrested and charged with manslaughter. Several weeks later, he
was released after a jury was split on his level
of responsibility, but they were unanimous that railroad management was
to blame for the conditions that caused the tragedy. Ultimately,
there were thirty lawsuits that resulted from this accident, including
(18:41):
one which awarded a six hundred thousand dollar payout to
a widow of a man who had been killed. This
was expensive to the company in addition to just being
a terrible tragedy uh, and it caused a lot of
ramifications in New York. The state legislature put limitations on
steam locomotives in the place, and by the end of
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nineteen o two, the railroad was scrambling to figure out
how it would manage under these new laws. These laws
forbade steam trains in the city all the way up
to the Harlem River. Then on December twenty two of
that year, engineer William J. Will Gas wrote the railroad
president a letter outlining an ambitious solution that was to
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tear down the old Grand Central and build a new
one that was designed to accommodate electric trains. Yeah, and
for clarity, the city had a number of years to
make this change over. It wasn't like effective immediately no trains,
but they were still in a bit of a panic
because they did not know how they were going to
continue their business, especially considering that they had lost a
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lot of money in these payouts. They were very, very worried.
So electric trains were still pretty new at this time.
They had been introduced in eight on the Baltimore and
Ohio line. But they also offered so many solutions to
the problems that and there was no smoker soot, there
was no need for large scale train sheds, and because
of that lack of a need for an above ground shed,
(20:07):
that meant that they could stack two levels of platforms
to accommodate greater numbers of trains and do it all underground.
Um this would mean that the ongoing issues of places
where above ground tracks caused traffic dangers could also be
finally addressed, and all of those criss crossing tracks could
be designed a little bit more elegantly and dropped underground.
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And the plan that Willis had the company would build
a twelve story building over the train terminal, with space
available for rent. He estimated that would bring in two
point three million dollars a year. This was not a
slam dunk suggestion. There was a lot of pushback from
the executive level about the estimated thirty five million dollar
budget for the project. Willgas was able to make his
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case to the board of directors of the railroad and
he did convince them. By mid January nineteen o three,
they were on board. Will Just had a full green
light to start the project. By June of nineteen o three,
New York Central Railroad was given rights to the city's
underground between Lexington and Madison and East forty two and
forty seven in perpetuity and exchange. The railroad agreed to
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an annual fee of twenty five thousand dollars. So this
project was a great opportunity for Willis. He got a
huge promotion out of the deal, but this was also
a huge challenge. He had to figure out how to
transition the railroad lines for electric cars, how to raise
the existing building, and how to construct a new one
while service continued. They could not shut down their train
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service at all, and he had to do this while
the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was the New York Central's direct competitor,
was also building their own brand new station servicing Manhattan,
set in the blocks between seventh and eighth Avenues from
thirty one to thirty third Street. While steam locomotives were
only banned in the city proper, will Gas figured they
would just go ahead and electrify their lines outside the
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city as well to accommodate a growing commuter population. This
level of electrification for a rail line had not been
done anywhere else at that time, and it's a little
bit of a spoiler alert, but will gets pulled it off,
so the railroad had been given until night to cease
operation of steam engines in the city. They were running
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electric by the end of nineteen o six. They had
started in August three moving a lot of the station's
business to Grand Central Palace Hotel so that the depot
turned station could start construction. Trains were still using the depot,
but passengers did all of their purchasing and checking of
items through the hotel. Will Gas also set up this
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construction plan of what he called bites. Basically, it was
little sections of railway that would be completed at a time,
which slowly chewed their way through the city, leaving new
electricity ready rail systems in their wakes. To design the
station itself, Railroad asked for submissions from architects. The contract
looked like it was going to go to a St.
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Paul firm, which was Read and Stem. Here's a handy coincidence.
Alan H. Stem was married to willgass sister, But another
firm with its own connections to the Vanderbilt family, just
Warren and Wetmore, submitted a design that was rushed through
approvals at New York Central That resulted in both firms
being used in a partnership agreement. The final plans weren't
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quite as ambitious as Willis had initially envisioned, but this
was still a massive project. As the station construction got underway,
the rail lines themselves continued to be augmented and switched
over with a new lower track that ran forty to
forty five ft underground. One eighteen thousand, five hundred ninety
seven tons of steel were used, and as many as
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ten thousand workers were employed during the busiest phases of construction.
The first electric train on the system ran on September
nineteen o six, and it and the other electric trains
that were part of the New York Central System could
run at much higher speeds than their steam counterparts, going
forty to fifty two miles per hour depending on where
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they were in the system. And the whole thing was
controlled by two massive lever systems, one for the regular
trains and one for the express trains, with four hundred
and three sixty two levers respectively. Forty levers were assigned
to each system operator, and this system was in an
underground tower under fifty Street, and while that early ahead
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of schedule, transition to electric trains was a huge feather
in William Willis's cap. He did not get to enjoy
his glory for very long. In February of nineteen o seven,
the company had expanded its electric line to include a
route to Westchester, and just two days after that line opened,
on February seven, there was an accident as the White
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Plains and Brewster Express was heading north through the Bronx
at six pm. The commuter train jumped off the tracks
while going around a curve at two d fifth Street.
Twenty people were killed, with one and fifty more injured.
Most of the deaths were people in the last car,
which was filled primarily with women and children. It was
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both a tragedy and a public relations nightmare for New
York Central. Will Gas and the company thought the cause
of this was a problem called nosing. This was a
problem where the tracks were widening slightly under the weight
of the new trains, so the locomotives would shift or
nose to one side or the other. Will Just kept
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detailed notes as he examined the possible causes of the wreck,
and this documented how he came to the conclusion that
nosing was the issue. The railroad's lawyer pushed him to
destroy these notes, which will Gas did, but then he
recreated them without telling the council or the company. They
were eventually donated, with a number of his other papers
(26:00):
to the New York Public Library. The railroad had started
redesigning their locomotives, but they left Wilgas out of the project,
and this after he had been told to destroy papers
that he thought were important because the company was worried
about if anybody found them. Just made him feel both
angry and insulted, and he resigned. While he went on
to have a lot of other achievements in his career
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and he won a number of awards, he was not
part of the grand opening of the terminal that he
had envisioned and guided through so much of its development.
We'll talk about the last phases of the projects that
played out after Wilgas's departure in just a moment after
we hear from the sponsors that keep our show going.
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The last train left the old Grand Central station on
June five, and then the full demolition of the building
began to make way for a new terminal that would
cover more than forty six acres of land. That's twice
the footprint of the structure it was replacing. It was
going to have the ability to handle triple the traffic
that its predecessor had. When the all new Grand Central
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Terminal opened at midnight on February second, nineteen thirteen, it
was filled with amenities. Women passengers had their own waiting
room attended by maids. There was a salon for women
and a barbershop for men. A telephone room stood ready
for communication needs, and advertisements touted the terminals knowledgeable and
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friendly staff dubbed walking Encyclopedia's. There were no stairs, only ramps.
Immigrants and laborers were still hidden away from other passengers though. Yeah,
they just did not fit into the the image that
they were trying to portray of this as a beautiful,
upscale place, so they grossly hit them away. The boz
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Are style Terminal was and still is a place with
some spectacular art. The massive sculpture Glory of Common, which
is also called Transportation, features Hercules Minerva and Mercury. It
was carved by Jules Felikutin for the facade, and that
was unveiled in nineteen fourteen. You can still see it.
It is still there today. The elliptical barrel vault ceiling
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had a celestial mural with overlays on the starfield showing
where various constellations sit in the ninth sky. So, if
you've ever been to Grand Central and looked up at
the current ceiling and marveled and said that sounds familiar,
that one that you're looking at is not the original.
That original painting got water damage and just became kind
of gross, and it was covered over and repainted to
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replicate the original in the nineteen forties. Then it was
cleaned and repainted again in the nineteen nineties. The first
train out was the Boston Express, the first train in
was a Harlem Line car, and over the course of
the terminal's first day, an estimated hundred and fifty thousand
people came to see it. Incidentally, the oldest tenant of
(28:57):
Grand Central Terminal is the Oyster Bar. That's a restaurant
that was there in nineteen thirteen. It is still there today,
although at the moment it is temporarily closed due to
pandemic restrictions. With the opening of the new terminal, which
drew a claim from the press, the neighborhood immediately surrounding
it just instantly became more valuable in terms of real estate.
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Grand Central was valued by the city's assessment at seventeen
point seven million dollars in nineteen thirteen, and just a
year after it opened, the properties surrounding it all more
than doubled in value that continued to rise in the
years after that. What had been an area filled with
warehouses changed really rapidly into an upscale section of Manhattan.
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Terminal City with its residences, hotels, and office buildings had
been part of wilgas earliest ideas to make Grand Central
terminal and anchor to a full business community. It had
remained in the plans, though the extent of it had
waxed and waned over time, and it came fully realized,
with connected buildings offering thousands of residents the choice to
(30:04):
travel from home to office while staying completely indoors if
they wished. The New York Times wrote, quote, the Grand
Central Terminal is not only a station, It is a monument,
a civic center, or, if one will, a city without exception.
It is not only the greatest station in the United States,
but the greatest station of any type in the world.
(30:25):
Grand Central continued to evolve over time, with various businesses
moving in and out through the years. In nineteen sixty seven,
Grand Central Terminal was designated as a landmark by the
Landmarks Preservation Commission, which meant that it was protected by law.
That commission, incidentally was formed in response to various buildings
of historical significance in the city being demolished. The final
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incident that catalyzed that commission to come to be and
this got Grand Central classified as a landmark, actually was
the demolition of Pennsylvania Station. Pennsylvania Railroad. New York Central
actually merged into one company called penn Central a year
after that landmark designation, and then proposed a significant renovation
of Grand Central that would have left the facade in place,
(31:11):
although I think it would have been um covered over.
It would have been internalized to the new design, and
it would have demolished a lot of the main building.
This proposed construction was not approved and led to Penn
Central filing a lawsuit against the city for preventing the project.
In this case dragged out until nineteen seventy six, when
(31:32):
Grand Central Terminal was added to the National Register of
Historic Places. The building complex, which had fallen into disrepair,
was eventually taken over by Metro North and it underwent
a massive multi year restoration and renovation that upgraded Grand
Central structurally as well as esthetically. And now there's all
kinds of fun stuff that goes on there. Yeah, I'll
(31:54):
tell my Grand Central story and are behind the scenes fabulous.
I love it. Anyway, New York, I miss you, that's
really I miss all of my favorite restaurants. UM. I
miss going to the mat. I really miss New York. UM.
(32:17):
I miss seeing our colleagues in New York like whole
other thing. It's like we'll see them sometimes on big
company meetings, but when you're on a huge video call,
not everyone shows anyway, and it just I miss all
those kiddos. UM. So for listener Mail, I'm going to
cross the country to talk about another famous thing in
(32:38):
a city that we have talked about recently, which is
Griffith Park. And this is from our listener Mike, who
wrote Ladies. Thanks for the story of Griffith Park and
Griffith J. Griffith. Although Griffith J. Griffith devolved into a pariah,
the park that he helped create is a true jewel
in the city of Los Angeles. I grew up about
six miles from the park, and over the years living
(32:58):
in the Southland, I learned the following at the park.
To swim at the park pool, ride a horse at
the pony rides and equestrian trails. The love of train
steam engines at travel town, astronomy from the observatory, love
of wildlife at the Old and New Zoo, love of
the outdoors by walking the trails and fire roads of
the park. Landscape photography by standing on the park's hilltops
(33:21):
and looking at the south Land and how dependent the
Southland is on imported water by the Mulholland Fountain. He
also goes on to recommend another thing, and he sent
us a picture of l A that was taken from
the observatory looking south and it's beautiful. Uh yeah, I'm
glad that. I'm glad that he wrote this, just because
we talked about it some in the episode about how
important it continues to be to l A's identity. But
(33:44):
it's just good for a local to remind us of
all of the cool things that are part of growing
up in l A that you can do in Griffith Park.
Um it I marvel whenever I'm there. At how much
of it remains undeveloped in kind of uh just natural landscape,
like again in a city that always blows my mind.
(34:05):
We talked about it when we talked about Central Park before,
but because it is so huge Griffith Park, I'm almost like, really,
they're just they're none of this is developed. Yeah. Yeah.
When we recorded that episode and you you had the
number of acres in there, um, I remember looking for
(34:26):
comparison at how big the Middlesex Fells are here in Massachusetts,
because that's like a big undeveloped park space full of trails,
and it's not entirely undeveloped. Parts of it are are
you know, there's like a dog park and that kind
of stuff, But like, yeah, it was way bigger, way
bigger than something I already felt like was huge. That's
(34:48):
the thing, right, If you've ever like, one of the
things I love to do when I'm in New York
is to walk the whole length of Central Park. It's
one of the things like Brian and I do together
when we're there and it takes a while and it's long,
and you realize how big the park is. And then
when I think like this was like way Huger, it
don't gives you a sense of scale and appreciation for it.
(35:09):
Um so yes. Thank you Mike for sharing that with us.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History pretty much everywhere, and if you would like
to subscribe to the show, you can do that on
the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcasts, or wherever
it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(35:33):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we're
a year into this pandemic almost at least in terms
(00:21):
of of places being locked down and travel restrictions happening.
And I really miss travel. I know that's like a
very privileging to miss, but I one of the things
I have really really been missing, and so is my husband,
has been New York. Um. Because prior to that, I
feel like I was getting to the point where I
was in New York once a month, and like, you know,
(00:43):
if it felt like second home for a while, I
would go to my usual fabric stores and they knew me,
and I would, you know, just tootle around New York
because I love it. UM. So I thought, to quell
my own wanderlust, it would be interesting to look at
the history of a place that is iconic to New
(01:03):
York UH, to try to help me cope with these feelings.
So I thought it would be fun to look at
the history of Grand Central Terminal as it started and evolved. Um.
This is a story that starts really with one of
the wealthiest names in US history. But it also kind
of becomes the story of the city itself, at least
(01:24):
since the mid eighteen hundreds, because Grand Central has been
such a pivotal element, as had the railroads in the
growth of Manhattan. So that's what we're covering today. In
the eighteen hundreds, New York was growing rapidly. We've talked
about this before, including in our episode on Seneca Village.
One of the big elements of the city's growth was
(01:46):
the development of railroads to connect the city to other
parts of the island of Manhattan and beyond. Three of
the major railroad companies that introduced lines in New York
City by the middle of the nineteenth century became the
drivers of the story of Grand Central. So the New
York and Harlem Railroad was chartered in eighteen thirty one,
(02:07):
and it initially ran tracks along Fourth Avenue that started
at twenty three Street and went all the way up
to the Harlem River. And then there were also eventually
branch tracks off of it that left that primary line
and kind of took left turns and stuff as well.
Keep in mind these were not yet steam engines. These
lines were carrying horse drawn cars at this point, and
(02:29):
then the Hudson River Railroad was established in eighteen forty
seven and ran, as the name suggests, along the Hudson
River for almost the length of the island. The New
York Central Railroad had formed in eighteen fifty three when
ten smaller railroads merged. Those railroads still exist today sort
of now they are part of the Metro North Railroad
(02:51):
company owned by the Umbrella company that has more name recognition.
That's Metropolitan Transit Authority or mt A. Yep, when you
see people tweeting about their MTA trains, it's all related
all the way back to the eighteen hundreds, and the
beginning of the consolidation of those three lines is thanks
to Cornelia's Vanderbilt. Today, the Vanderbilt name is associated with wealth,
(03:15):
but when Cornelius was born on nine four on Staten Island,
his family lived in poverty. Cornelius only went to school
until he was eleven because after that he had to
focus on earning money for the family, working alongside his
father on the docks as part of his father's ferry service.
When he was sixteen, Cornelius Vanderbilt bought his first boat.
(03:38):
Sometimes this is also reported as being two boats, and
he started his own ferrying service, carrying people from Staten
Island to New York City. And while he ran the
business on his own, he had gotten a loan from
his parents for the purchase, so he shared his profits
with them. From that small beginning, he built a fleet,
taking advantage of the War of eighteen twelve to eight
(04:00):
span so that he could carry needed supplies to various
outposts through a government contract. So he made some money
from this enterprise, and he sold his little armada just
eight years into this ferry business and became a captain
award a steamship. That seems weird, and he spent eleven
years in that role, and then in nine he kind
(04:21):
of goes back to his roots of being an entrepreneur
because he parlayed his expertise in steamships that he had
gained to start his own steamship company, once again offering
ferry service, but this time in a much more upscale
fashion to his previous first company's offering. And he was
fairly cutthroat when it came to his competitors. That's the
kindest way I can put that. He lowered his fares
(04:44):
to the point that he pushed other New York ferry
services into a corner they were going to go out
of business because they could not compete, and they eventually
paid him just to move his business to another market.
Then he shifted his company's roots to run some Massachusetts
and Rhode Island from Long Island along the Hudson River,
and his wealth continued to grow at this point, just exponentially.
(05:07):
He eventually expanded his shipping business two routes that included
New Orleans and then the US West Coast via passage
through Nicaragua, which was shorter and faster than the one
through Panama that most of his competitors were using. Once again,
he pushed his competition to the brink of ruin and
then cut a deal so that they could pay him
(05:27):
to cease operations, which they did. Uh. You might have
gathered from this that Vanderbilt was kind of a business
genius but also a real jerk in most ways. Uh.
This fleet of steamboats that he amassed earned him the
nickname commodore. Yeah, and a lot of those dealings, I
mean he's getting paid to not work like he's like,
(05:48):
you will pay me and then pay me an annual
stipend to continue to not compete with you, which is,
as I said, cutthroat is the nicest way I can
put it. After he left the shipping industry, Vanderbilt turned
his eye to railroads, which at this point he was
starting to see us having far more potential for growth
than shipping trust. We're leaving out a lot of stuff
(06:11):
here about his various ongoing feuds with other people, but
at this point he started purchasing stock in the New
York and Harlem Railroad, and he continued to do so
until he kind of cornered the market and then owned
the line that was in sixty three. By eighteen sixty nine,
he had also taken control of the Hudson River Railroad
(06:31):
and the New York Central Railroad, and the acquisition of
the New York Central Railroad was downright ruthless. He had
refused to take passengers from the New York Central Line
onto his other railroads as connections during the winter, when
the path along the Erie Canal that Central would have
normally used was frozen over. So this meant that both
(06:53):
freight and passengers were cut off and isolated, and to
quell the growing unrest and difficulty, the Central Railroad at.
As a consequence, the New York Central Railroad sold control
of the company to Vanderbilt just to get everything moving again.
One of the ways that Vanderbilt had outmaneuvered his competition
throughout his career was by having capital on hand before
(07:15):
starting a new venture, whether it was ships or railroads.
He was able to undercut marketplace cost to the consumer
because he had enough to not have to jack up
his prices to keep the business afloat. Simultaneously, he invested
large portions of his capital into infrastructure, so he was
upgrading his businesses, many of which had been struggling when
(07:39):
he acquired them, to then make them more profitable. Yeah. Basically,
he could take the time to make the investment and
take an initial loss and then be like, look, my
line is way more luxurious and I'm charging way less
than the other guys, and of course everyone would flock
to that. Uh. This consolidation that he created with the
railroads started a number of industry standards in the US
(08:03):
based on rules that Vanderbilt insisted on. For one, all
of his railroad employees were a uniform. For another, he
instituted the policy that tickets had to be punched before boarding.
This is not, to be clear a situation where Vanderbilt
invented these practices. They were already standard procedure in Britain.
For example, he actually modeled a lot of his trained
(08:25):
business on the way Britain managed their trains, but he
just integrated them into US business and made them the standard.
So in terms of connecting various locations to each other,
these rail lines were pretty great, and Vanderbilt was making
a lot of money. But there was also the very
real problem of pollution. New Yorkers did not like all
(08:48):
the soot that came with trains in the city. As
a consequence, the city ordinance had been issued in eighteen
fifty four that banned steam engines from traveling south of Street.
If you were in the city lower than that, you
would only see horse drawn conveyances. Yes, the trains would
all stop at forty two, passengers would switch over to carriages,
(09:10):
and that's how they would get around in the southern
part of Manhattan Island. And again that that ordinance happened
before he really got like huge into into trains. But
naturally he saw this and wanted to extend his railroad service,
and he also wanted to make it easier to coordinate
among the three railroads that he now owned, so he
(09:31):
was at the start of eighteen sixty nine running lines
with two separate terminals. He did not have a freight
complex for the Hudson Line, and so his approach of
developing infrastructure was that whole thing where he would like
use his money to build it up. Was what led
Vanderbilt to construct the Grand Central Depot starting in eighteen
sixty nine. The decision was to build a transit hub
(09:55):
at forty two Street that all three lines could use
on a tract of land in the St. John's Park neighborhood.
This project, which was known as the Grand Central Depost,
started in eighteen sixty nine. The face of the structure
on Street was two nine feet wide and extended north
to east forty Street. The land that the railroad did
(10:18):
not already own was purchased by Vanderbilt, once again through
his use of pressure. Oh he loved to pressure people
to give him what he wanted, uh So in eighteen
fifty again. Way before this, the General Railroad Law of
New York State had established a rule regarding land that
Vanderbilt was happy to exploit when it came time to
(10:39):
do so. So, in an effort to foster growth and infrastructure,
via this law, the railroads have been given the power
to appropriate land and then have its value assessed by
the court system. So basically say, hey, person, I need
your land. The court's gonna tell us what it's worth,
and I'll pay you that. And though there was at
(11:00):
least one offer by a landholder to lease Vanderbilt his property,
instead of selling, the tycoon insisted that he always bought
and never leased, and he was able to acquire the
plot in question, as well as every other tract of
land that he needed for his project. Many of these
assessments were likely at far lower prices than they should
(11:22):
have been, thanks to the various connections that Vanderbilt had
two people in power, which he was again perfectly happy
to massage and manipulate. In the end, Grand Central Depot
cost Cornelius Vanderbilt six point four million dollars was designed
by architect John B. Snook and it opened on November one, one,
(11:44):
so estimating that six point four million dollar value today
puts it at more than a hundred and forty million dollars.
It had five elevated platforms, five mansward roofs tower in
honor of each of the three railroad companies that came
together there. It had a sixty thousand square foot glass roof,
offering passengers a sense of grandeur as they boarded and
(12:07):
made their transfers. Whistles and bells were not allowed inside
the train shed, so it was surprisingly quiet. I will
say at this point that the use of the phrase
train shed always cracks me up when looking at these
historical things, because I think of a shed as a
small structure in your backyard. But these were I mean,
this was like the train version of Paxton's Crystal Palace.
(12:28):
It was huge, and it's where all the trains came
through and all of the passengers boarding. So we're gonna
talk about the reaction to Vanderbilt's new train depot and
how it evolved after we first paused for a sponsor break.
So once it opened, some journalists downplayed Vanderbilt's depot as
(12:51):
being neither central nor grand uh and one writer actually
called it end of the world station. Part of the
criticism here came from the logistical arrangement of the station,
so inbound trains arrived on the east side of the
so called shed, and outbound trains exited on the west
side at that meant that trains needed to sometimes cross
each other's paths north of the station, so it created
(13:14):
kind of a weird traffic tangle. Also, even though this
was spacious, sometimes passenger traffic caused log jams of people
as the passengers tried to navigate through the platforms. And
dozens of trains came and went through the facility every day,
and each railroad line had a separate waiting room, so
(13:34):
for people who had to do their transfer with luggage,
this was an especially trying or deal. Still, the depot
had its bans, with the New York Herald calling it
quote the finest passenger railroad depot in the world. In
eighteen seventy two, increased demand for more tracks led to
complaints that the train tracks were already creating huge swaths
(13:55):
of unsafe areas as crossing multiple tracks which was necessary
to traverse certain parts of the city on foot or
in vehicles, that you were putting yourself in danger almost
every time, especially as the traffic load increased on those tracks.
In a letter to the New York Times, one resident wrote, quote,
there is no single thing on New York Island so
(14:16):
dangerous to the community and prejudicial to its interests as
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, which cuts the
city into its entire length and stretches unpaved, ungraded, and
is given over to the hundreds of locomotives that continually
dash up and down through the richest district of New York.
This led Vanderbilt to run sunken tracks with bridges in
(14:38):
place for pedestrians to safely pass over them. For seeing
that the same problem would crop up in other neighborhoods
north of this main area of complaint, he also made
arrangements to tunnel through the rock below the city streets
up to tracks were sunk underground up to the Harlem River.
In eighteen sixty nine, a sculpture of Commodore Vanderbilt by
(15:01):
sculptor Ernst Plasman was commissioned by one of Vanderbilt's associates,
Albert DeGroot, and was erected downtown at one of his
his older train depots. I believe this bronze statue is
reported as costing eight hundred thousand dollars, but for all
of that money, the reviews of it were really not good.
Lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong wrote of the statue
(15:24):
quote as a work of art, it is beast youll
you can decide for yourself if you're in New York.
That statue still exists, but it now sits at the
south facade of the Grand Central Terminal. De Groot had
been planning a second statue specifically for Grand Central Depot,
and Vanderbilt had even had architects Snook create a space
for it, but the poor reception to the first one
(15:46):
caused them to reconsider. Cornelius Vanderbilt died in eighteen seventy seven,
but his son William, who inherited most of his father's
businesses and money, and then William's sons, continued to run
the depost successfully for more than twenty more years, and
in a way, vanderbilt success in normalizing train travel for
New York also led to the downfall of his Grand
(16:07):
Central Depot. Train commuting became so commonplace that demands sword,
which meant that the depot really was no longer big
enough to handle the required traffic for the city. In
nineteen hundred, there were one point eight million people in
New York City and Grand Central depot, which at that
point was just thirty years old, was already considered woefully
(16:27):
outdated for what the city needed. There had been an
effort to expand the facility a couple of years earlier
that included an exterior transformation to a Neo Renaissance style.
That renovation had built the structure up, adding several floors.
In nine hundred, another round of renovation started that reorganized
(16:49):
the layout of the depot, which by then was already
being called Grand Central Station. The separate waiting rooms were
combined into one large space. A women only waiting room
and retiring room was created, and then another waiting room
was added underground for lower class passengers that they would
not crowd the main waiting area. And yes, I would
(17:12):
not even call it thinly veiled. This is a pretty
over way of relegating the poor immigrant community into a
waiting room in the basement. Yeah, there's actually a company
executive I think who is like basically made this statement
to the papers that was like, don't worry. You can
come to the station and you won't see poor people
(17:34):
to upset you on your travels. It's a little it's
super ikey um. New tunnels for trains had also been
added by this point, and while these tunnels were vented,
they still filled with steam and smoke regularly. This of
course impacted visibility. You can see where it's going. And
on January eighth, nineteen o two, the horrible but inevitable
(17:56):
finally happened. That is an incident that is now own
as the Park Avenue crash. This collision happened because an
engineer running an express train from White Plains just couldn't
see the signal that indicated that another train was up ahead.
The express rear ended a commuter train. Fifteen people died
(18:18):
instantly and dozens more were badly injured. The engineer, John Whisker,
was arrested and charged with manslaughter. Several weeks later, he
was released after a jury was split on his level
of responsibility, but they were unanimous that railroad management was
to blame for the conditions that caused the tragedy. Ultimately,
there were thirty lawsuits that resulted from this accident, including
(18:41):
one which awarded a six hundred thousand dollar payout to
a widow of a man who had been killed. This
was expensive to the company in addition to just being
a terrible tragedy uh, and it caused a lot of
ramifications in New York. The state legislature put limitations on
steam locomotives in the place, and by the end of
(19:02):
nineteen o two, the railroad was scrambling to figure out
how it would manage under these new laws. These laws
forbade steam trains in the city all the way up
to the Harlem River. Then on December twenty two of
that year, engineer William J. Will Gas wrote the railroad
president a letter outlining an ambitious solution that was to
(19:24):
tear down the old Grand Central and build a new
one that was designed to accommodate electric trains. Yeah, and
for clarity, the city had a number of years to
make this change over. It wasn't like effective immediately no trains,
but they were still in a bit of a panic
because they did not know how they were going to
continue their business, especially considering that they had lost a
(19:45):
lot of money in these payouts. They were very, very worried.
So electric trains were still pretty new at this time.
They had been introduced in eight on the Baltimore and
Ohio line. But they also offered so many solutions to
the problems that and there was no smoker soot, there
was no need for large scale train sheds, and because
of that lack of a need for an above ground shed,
(20:07):
that meant that they could stack two levels of platforms
to accommodate greater numbers of trains and do it all underground.
Um this would mean that the ongoing issues of places
where above ground tracks caused traffic dangers could also be
finally addressed, and all of those criss crossing tracks could
be designed a little bit more elegantly and dropped underground.
(20:28):
And the plan that Willis had the company would build
a twelve story building over the train terminal, with space
available for rent. He estimated that would bring in two
point three million dollars a year. This was not a
slam dunk suggestion. There was a lot of pushback from
the executive level about the estimated thirty five million dollar
budget for the project. Willgas was able to make his
(20:50):
case to the board of directors of the railroad and
he did convince them. By mid January nineteen o three,
they were on board. Will Just had a full green
light to start the project. By June of nineteen o three,
New York Central Railroad was given rights to the city's
underground between Lexington and Madison and East forty two and
forty seven in perpetuity and exchange. The railroad agreed to
(21:15):
an annual fee of twenty five thousand dollars. So this
project was a great opportunity for Willis. He got a
huge promotion out of the deal, but this was also
a huge challenge. He had to figure out how to
transition the railroad lines for electric cars, how to raise
the existing building, and how to construct a new one
while service continued. They could not shut down their train
(21:38):
service at all, and he had to do this while
the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was the New York Central's direct competitor,
was also building their own brand new station servicing Manhattan,
set in the blocks between seventh and eighth Avenues from
thirty one to thirty third Street. While steam locomotives were
only banned in the city proper, will Gas figured they
would just go ahead and electrify their lines outside the
(22:00):
city as well to accommodate a growing commuter population. This
level of electrification for a rail line had not been
done anywhere else at that time, and it's a little
bit of a spoiler alert, but will gets pulled it off,
so the railroad had been given until night to cease
operation of steam engines in the city. They were running
(22:22):
electric by the end of nineteen o six. They had
started in August three moving a lot of the station's
business to Grand Central Palace Hotel so that the depot
turned station could start construction. Trains were still using the depot,
but passengers did all of their purchasing and checking of
items through the hotel. Will Gas also set up this
(22:44):
construction plan of what he called bites. Basically, it was
little sections of railway that would be completed at a time,
which slowly chewed their way through the city, leaving new
electricity ready rail systems in their wakes. To design the
station itself, Railroad asked for submissions from architects. The contract
looked like it was going to go to a St.
(23:06):
Paul firm, which was Read and Stem. Here's a handy coincidence.
Alan H. Stem was married to willgass sister, But another
firm with its own connections to the Vanderbilt family, just
Warren and Wetmore, submitted a design that was rushed through
approvals at New York Central That resulted in both firms
being used in a partnership agreement. The final plans weren't
(23:29):
quite as ambitious as Willis had initially envisioned, but this
was still a massive project. As the station construction got underway,
the rail lines themselves continued to be augmented and switched
over with a new lower track that ran forty to
forty five ft underground. One eighteen thousand, five hundred ninety
seven tons of steel were used, and as many as
(23:50):
ten thousand workers were employed during the busiest phases of construction.
The first electric train on the system ran on September
nineteen o six, and it and the other electric trains
that were part of the New York Central System could
run at much higher speeds than their steam counterparts, going
forty to fifty two miles per hour depending on where
(24:12):
they were in the system. And the whole thing was
controlled by two massive lever systems, one for the regular
trains and one for the express trains, with four hundred
and three sixty two levers respectively. Forty levers were assigned
to each system operator, and this system was in an
underground tower under fifty Street, and while that early ahead
(24:36):
of schedule, transition to electric trains was a huge feather
in William Willis's cap. He did not get to enjoy
his glory for very long. In February of nineteen o seven,
the company had expanded its electric line to include a
route to Westchester, and just two days after that line opened,
on February seven, there was an accident as the White
(24:57):
Plains and Brewster Express was heading north through the Bronx
at six pm. The commuter train jumped off the tracks
while going around a curve at two d fifth Street.
Twenty people were killed, with one and fifty more injured.
Most of the deaths were people in the last car,
which was filled primarily with women and children. It was
(25:18):
both a tragedy and a public relations nightmare for New
York Central. Will Gas and the company thought the cause
of this was a problem called nosing. This was a
problem where the tracks were widening slightly under the weight
of the new trains, so the locomotives would shift or
nose to one side or the other. Will Just kept
(25:39):
detailed notes as he examined the possible causes of the wreck,
and this documented how he came to the conclusion that
nosing was the issue. The railroad's lawyer pushed him to
destroy these notes, which will Gas did, but then he
recreated them without telling the council or the company. They
were eventually donated, with a number of his other papers
(26:00):
to the New York Public Library. The railroad had started
redesigning their locomotives, but they left Wilgas out of the project,
and this after he had been told to destroy papers
that he thought were important because the company was worried
about if anybody found them. Just made him feel both
angry and insulted, and he resigned. While he went on
to have a lot of other achievements in his career
(26:22):
and he won a number of awards, he was not
part of the grand opening of the terminal that he
had envisioned and guided through so much of its development.
We'll talk about the last phases of the projects that
played out after Wilgas's departure in just a moment after
we hear from the sponsors that keep our show going.
(26:47):
The last train left the old Grand Central station on
June five, and then the full demolition of the building
began to make way for a new terminal that would
cover more than forty six acres of land. That's twice
the footprint of the structure it was replacing. It was
going to have the ability to handle triple the traffic
that its predecessor had. When the all new Grand Central
(27:09):
Terminal opened at midnight on February second, nineteen thirteen, it
was filled with amenities. Women passengers had their own waiting
room attended by maids. There was a salon for women
and a barbershop for men. A telephone room stood ready
for communication needs, and advertisements touted the terminals knowledgeable and
(27:29):
friendly staff dubbed walking Encyclopedia's. There were no stairs, only ramps.
Immigrants and laborers were still hidden away from other passengers though. Yeah,
they just did not fit into the the image that
they were trying to portray of this as a beautiful,
upscale place, so they grossly hit them away. The boz
(27:53):
Are style Terminal was and still is a place with
some spectacular art. The massive sculpture Glory of Common, which
is also called Transportation, features Hercules Minerva and Mercury. It
was carved by Jules Felikutin for the facade, and that
was unveiled in nineteen fourteen. You can still see it.
It is still there today. The elliptical barrel vault ceiling
(28:15):
had a celestial mural with overlays on the starfield showing
where various constellations sit in the ninth sky. So, if
you've ever been to Grand Central and looked up at
the current ceiling and marveled and said that sounds familiar,
that one that you're looking at is not the original.
That original painting got water damage and just became kind
of gross, and it was covered over and repainted to
(28:35):
replicate the original in the nineteen forties. Then it was
cleaned and repainted again in the nineteen nineties. The first
train out was the Boston Express, the first train in
was a Harlem Line car, and over the course of
the terminal's first day, an estimated hundred and fifty thousand
people came to see it. Incidentally, the oldest tenant of
(28:57):
Grand Central Terminal is the Oyster Bar. That's a restaurant
that was there in nineteen thirteen. It is still there today,
although at the moment it is temporarily closed due to
pandemic restrictions. With the opening of the new terminal, which
drew a claim from the press, the neighborhood immediately surrounding
it just instantly became more valuable in terms of real estate.
(29:19):
Grand Central was valued by the city's assessment at seventeen
point seven million dollars in nineteen thirteen, and just a
year after it opened, the properties surrounding it all more
than doubled in value that continued to rise in the
years after that. What had been an area filled with
warehouses changed really rapidly into an upscale section of Manhattan.
(29:43):
Terminal City with its residences, hotels, and office buildings had
been part of wilgas earliest ideas to make Grand Central
terminal and anchor to a full business community. It had
remained in the plans, though the extent of it had
waxed and waned over time, and it came fully realized,
with connected buildings offering thousands of residents the choice to
(30:04):
travel from home to office while staying completely indoors if
they wished. The New York Times wrote, quote, the Grand
Central Terminal is not only a station, It is a monument,
a civic center, or, if one will, a city without exception.
It is not only the greatest station in the United States,
but the greatest station of any type in the world.
(30:25):
Grand Central continued to evolve over time, with various businesses
moving in and out through the years. In nineteen sixty seven,
Grand Central Terminal was designated as a landmark by the
Landmarks Preservation Commission, which meant that it was protected by law.
That commission, incidentally was formed in response to various buildings
of historical significance in the city being demolished. The final
(30:49):
incident that catalyzed that commission to come to be and
this got Grand Central classified as a landmark, actually was
the demolition of Pennsylvania Station. Pennsylvania Railroad. New York Central
actually merged into one company called penn Central a year
after that landmark designation, and then proposed a significant renovation
of Grand Central that would have left the facade in place,
(31:11):
although I think it would have been um covered over.
It would have been internalized to the new design, and
it would have demolished a lot of the main building.
This proposed construction was not approved and led to Penn
Central filing a lawsuit against the city for preventing the project.
In this case dragged out until nineteen seventy six, when
(31:32):
Grand Central Terminal was added to the National Register of
Historic Places. The building complex, which had fallen into disrepair,
was eventually taken over by Metro North and it underwent
a massive multi year restoration and renovation that upgraded Grand
Central structurally as well as esthetically. And now there's all
kinds of fun stuff that goes on there. Yeah, I'll
(31:54):
tell my Grand Central story and are behind the scenes fabulous.
I love it. Anyway, New York, I miss you, that's
really I miss all of my favorite restaurants. UM. I
miss going to the mat. I really miss New York. UM.
(32:17):
I miss seeing our colleagues in New York like whole
other thing. It's like we'll see them sometimes on big
company meetings, but when you're on a huge video call,
not everyone shows anyway, and it just I miss all
those kiddos. UM. So for listener Mail, I'm going to
cross the country to talk about another famous thing in
(32:38):
a city that we have talked about recently, which is
Griffith Park. And this is from our listener Mike, who
wrote Ladies. Thanks for the story of Griffith Park and
Griffith J. Griffith. Although Griffith J. Griffith devolved into a pariah,
the park that he helped create is a true jewel
in the city of Los Angeles. I grew up about
six miles from the park, and over the years living
(32:58):
in the Southland, I learned the following at the park.
To swim at the park pool, ride a horse at
the pony rides and equestrian trails. The love of train
steam engines at travel town, astronomy from the observatory, love
of wildlife at the Old and New Zoo, love of
the outdoors by walking the trails and fire roads of
the park. Landscape photography by standing on the park's hilltops
(33:21):
and looking at the south Land and how dependent the
Southland is on imported water by the Mulholland Fountain. He
also goes on to recommend another thing, and he sent
us a picture of l A that was taken from
the observatory looking south and it's beautiful. Uh yeah, I'm
glad that. I'm glad that he wrote this, just because
we talked about it some in the episode about how
important it continues to be to l A's identity. But
(33:44):
it's just good for a local to remind us of
all of the cool things that are part of growing
up in l A that you can do in Griffith Park.
Um it I marvel whenever I'm there. At how much
of it remains undeveloped in kind of uh just natural landscape,
like again in a city that always blows my mind.
(34:05):
We talked about it when we talked about Central Park before,
but because it is so huge Griffith Park, I'm almost like, really,
they're just they're none of this is developed. Yeah. Yeah.
When we recorded that episode and you you had the
number of acres in there, um, I remember looking for
(34:26):
comparison at how big the Middlesex Fells are here in Massachusetts,
because that's like a big undeveloped park space full of trails,
and it's not entirely undeveloped. Parts of it are are
you know, there's like a dog park and that kind
of stuff, But like, yeah, it was way bigger, way
bigger than something I already felt like was huge. That's
(34:48):
the thing, right, If you've ever like, one of the
things I love to do when I'm in New York
is to walk the whole length of Central Park. It's
one of the things like Brian and I do together
when we're there and it takes a while and it's long,
and you realize how big the park is. And then
when I think like this was like way Huger, it
don't gives you a sense of scale and appreciation for it.
(35:09):
Um so yes. Thank you Mike for sharing that with us.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History pretty much everywhere, and if you would like
to subscribe to the show, you can do that on
the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcasts, or wherever
it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(35:33):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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