Grand Central Station

The island of Manhattan, which for most people is what is New York, is covered with  a plethora of buildings, but there is one that whilst not towering above the others certainly serves as an outstanding testimony to the art of constructing a public edifice to be at once a lasting, well designed, efficient, effective and aesthetically appealing statement.

In 1871, when New York was still a small town, the city authorities alarmed at the way steam trains kept exploding and killing people, passed a law that restricted trains to below 42nd Street. At this time New York was the epicentre of US trade - almost everything that was traded into or out of the US came through New York, and of course in the age of rail roads, this meant most freight was carried by train. At this time the station that was to become Grand Central was sixty tracks wide - the length of five city blocks (from 42nd to 50th street).  A bright spark at one of the railroad companies came up with the idea of putting the tracks underground - or more accurately building over the top of the tracks. (If you walk between Lexington and Madison avenues between 42nd and 50th streets you will notice that you have to walk up a hill, which is completely artificially created - you are walking between two and three stories up and over the railway tracks. All of the buildings built on this hill have specially designed steel foundations that fit between the tracks)



Grand Central Station was opened in 1913 and was built so that no major structural work would be required for 700 years. (The railway companies took full advantage of this and no major maintenance was carried out until 1995 because the companies wanted to knock down the station and sell the real estate. This was the fate of the apparently even more impressive Penn Station built around the same time - it was demolished and the land sold off. Notice the two small black squares in the photo - that was the colour of the roof in 1995 which restoration work began) 


The station was constructed as a statement of the achievements of a grand society, and was intended to uplift all those who passed through it, encouraging them to see the full range of human potential. The design of the station was a work of passive architectural genius, designed to funnel people in and out in the quickest time possible:

• despite descending four floors underground there are no stairs - only gently sloping walkways
• passageways begin as narrow, low roofed walkways and progressively become wider and taller, leading to large, open well lit rooms with atriums
  
• only 6 platforms were used for arriving passengers, all grouped together, with a narrow walkway that lead out to an open meeting room with an atrium, and then directly out on to the street to a taxi rank or to a subway train. Departure platforms were located a floor below so that departing and arriving passenger wouldn't cross paths
• the building didn't have air-conditioning, instead the large windows in the main hall were opened and the sea breeze (after all Manhattan is an island no more than 2 miles wide) would blow through and cool the building). In winter the windows were closed and the 100 watts per person of human generated body warmth was exploited to heat the station

(Later most of these design principles were appropriated by shopping centre builders to subconsciously direct customers through shopping centres - obviously with the principles reversed)

These days when most public buildings are now more than slabs of concrete, chugging through the world's resources at an alarming rate to heat and cool them, with no apparent underlying design other than to reduce the cost of construction, it is reassuring to see that humanity does actually have the knowledge and ability to construct functional  and aesthetically pleasing buildings which "uplift the human spirit". If only the knowledge could be applied.