The Grand in Central Is Leaving the Station

There are many ways to destroy the past. Since the first train eased out of an underground tunnel on Feb. 2, 1913, Grand Central Terminal has survived a gruesome addition, the threat of total demolition and the merciless 1963 destruction of its across-town cousin, Penn Station--once one of the great architectural works of the century. Now it faces a more insidious fate, already half-complete: a $187-million restoration sponsored by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, owners of the terminal, scheduled for completion early next year.

In a now-familiar scheme for funding public works, the classic train station’s restoration will create 60% more available retail space than before. The projected increase in revenue is expected to pay for the $84 million in bond money raised to pay for construction. Grand Central will soon be plush with posh restaurants and espresso bars.

But progress today comes at a harsh cost. If the original vision of Grand Central--from its sweeping ramps to its towering ceiling--was to celebrate the relentless motion of the masses, it is about to become a testament to a culture driven by the need to consume. The rushing commuter will be lost in a crowd of meandering tourists, and the public realm will suffer another tragic blow.

It is a subtle shift--one that can be easily overlooked in a city that is under siege by corporate toy stores and discount department stores. At the other end of 42nd Street, after all, Times Square is undergoing a much more radical transformation. But Times Square has long flaunted itself as a world icon of shameless crass consumption--the fact that it has shifted from porn to Disney is a reflection of current moral tastes. By contrast, Grand Central Terminal belongs to a time when New York was still a nascent, unspoiled vision of the heroic metropolis.

Hungry advertisers and developers have long wanted a piece of the terminal. In 1950, the financially strapped New York Central Railroad, which at the time owned the terminal, leased the Grand Concourse’s east balcony to Eastman Kodak. Kodak installed a mock photo lab, information booth and its first 60-foot-wide backlit transparency, of a quintessential ‘50s-era mom happily snapping a shot of cherubic children. “We’ve had our eyes on this balcony for some time,” a Kodak exec said gleefully at the time.

In 1956, New York Central unveiled plans to replace the entire structure with an 80-story I.M. Pei-designed “hyperboloid” tower that would take advantage of the property’s lucrative midtown air rights. Other proposals followed: a huge commercial block with six squat, interlocking towers pierced by Park Avenue; a three-story, 44-lane bowling alley in the structure’s main waiting room. All failed.

In 1963, the concrete-and-glass Pan Am building (now Metropolitan Life)--with its trademark logo and faceted facade designed by former Bauhaus dean Walter Gropius--was built against the terminal’s northern flank. Gropius brutally welded the tower to the back of the terminal, with four escalators clumsily piercing the concourse.

Five years later, in one final insult, the railroad company, now named PennCommentary

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Central Corp., commissioned Marcel Breuer, Gropius’ Harvard colleague, to design an office tower that would “float” above the terminal. After a decade of legal maneuvering and a picket line manned by Jacqueline Onassis, the Supreme Court intervened on behalf of the preservationists--the court’s first-ever decision on a historic preservation issue.

To those who witnessed these near-catastrophes, the current make-over may seem restrained. Beyer Blinder Belle, the architects that converted Ellis Island into a museum, are restoring the terminal to a polish that few can remember. Some clutter will be cleared away. Along the main concourse, a row of makeshift offices that were crammed in between the ticket windows and the main waiting room in the 1920s will be torn out, creating a magnificent double-height space above the ramps that leads down to the lower concourse.

A glass-and-steel-clad shoe store built in 1960 at the corner exit to Vanderbilt and 42nd Streets will also be removed, revealing another double-height space with views through a glass wall to the covered street-level taxi stand. The terminal’s east entrance--which always seemed an ill-conceived afterthought--will become more prominent.

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However, the overt brutality of the ‘50s and ‘60s is being replaced in the ‘90s by the developer’s more subtly horrifying conceit: mixed-use development. Once the terminal’s walls are scrubbed clean, construction will begin on the myriad food halls and restaurants. Already, the main waiting room along 42nd Street, an inspiring 63-foot-high room restored in 1993, is filled with rows of “seasonal fine gift” booths. The glamour is hard to find.

The east entry, which is divided into three distinct passageways that all lead to Lexington Avenue, will be lined with food stalls allegedly so that commuters can load up with bags of groceries to take with them onto the rush-hour trains. Below, the vast lower concourse that fronts the bustling Oyster Bar will be stuffed with rows of takeout counters in a plan that looks suspiciously like the cluttered face of a pinball machine.

Nor is the Grand Concourse itself sacred. A second grand stair--modeled after an early plan that was never realized--is being constructed along the east balcony that once belonged to Kodak. But unlike its existing western twin, it will not lead out to the street but up to restaurants that will soon ring the concourse below. Both stairs will be flanked by cafes, replacing another existing waiting area. The eye will no longer travel up to the spectacle of stone pillars above but will stop at the chewing faces of office workers and tourists. (One symbolic oddity: The east stair will be 3 1/2 feet higher than the west, visually distorting the main space.)

To those who can remember, the terminal’s power resonated from its great, high void: as if the stone pillars were able to keep out the chaos of consumers outside along 42nd Street, filtering the swirling masses neatly into their proper channels.

Anxious riders would sit on the wooden benches, peering into the doorways and archways that led to the mysteries of the outside world. It was the New York of the commuter, what E.B. White called “the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.”

But that commuter dismounting his train from Poughkeepsie--clutching his New Yorker and flask of gin--will soon be an afterthought, replaced by the meandering shopper with no real place to go. The romantic energy of the terminal as a great gateway--the notion that each door and tunnel leads to adventure or escape--will disappear. Soon the message will be if you want to wait, you had better eat something.

The MTA has conspicuously disavowed comparisons to similar developments, like Washington’s Union Station, the once tragically dilapidated landmark station that was transformed into a mall-like warren of cheap shops in 1988. (The same retail marketer was involved in both projects.) Officials say that the capital’s Arby’s and McDonald’s will be refined, truffle-trimmed gourmet eateries in New York.

But the issue is not one of taste. The purpose of the new look is to lure another kind of public--one that has no connection to the original purpose of the building. Like their brethren streaming into 57th Street’s Planet Hollywood, they are here to consume. They are a public that is more carefully screened, more palatable and willing to spend money because they have nothing better to do with their time.

Great cities, however, are about density and conflict--they are created by a layering of historical and cultural spaces. The genuinely democratic age of Central Park and the New York Public Library was followed by the heroism of Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building. These spaces are gateways into another vision of the future--one more innocent and inspired.

Is this a disaster on the scale of Breuer’s proposal to plunge a tower through the terminal’s heart? Probably not. Is it a disaster more permanent than Kodak’s gruesome commercial flag? Of course.

The willingness to neglect the historical meaning of the terminal to lure middle-aged mall rats will alter the personality of the space forever. I preferred the company of the worn-down commuters, the loiterers, the needy and the homeless.