Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1998/11/10/restoring_monuments_of_american_will.php
Tuesday, November 10, 1998
When New York's Grand Central Terminal was rededicated on October 1, after a decade-long, $200-million renovation, the event came as a brilliant shaft of light amid the many glooms of the current cultural situation. For the effort of those ten years reclaimed a great public space — accommodating a major structure from the steel/coal/oil age to late twentieth-century tastes. And that reclamation is of prime historical, perhaps even philosophical, importance.
It need not have turned out this way. In a dialectical sense the very survival of Grand Central is due to the 1963 destruction, across town, of McKim, Mead, and White's Pennsylvania Station. This act of economically driven barbarism gave energy to New York City's preservation movement, which now has real clout.
The structure which might have gone the way of Penn Station arose in 1903-1913, conceived by the architects Warren and Wetmore as a frankly imperial statement. Like almost all the great New York public buildings of that period it was constructed upon the tidal wave of industrial and commercial wealth that flowed out of the Union victory in the Civil War. In Manhattan the wealth moved north from Washington Square to Gramercy Park and 23rd Street, and then along Park and Madison Avenues to 42nd Street, where Grand Central was built, and soon beyond.
Grand Central Terminal was to be a temple of rail power, and as such it was complementary to three other Beaux-Arts statements about the components of civilization; the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History. Mark Twain ineptly called the era that produced these magnificent structures 'The Gilded Age.' Gilded? They could withstand a nuclear attack.
With Grand Central we associate the name of Cornelius J. 'Commodore' Vanderbilt. Standing like a Roman consul, his statue embellishes the magnificent south facade on 42nd Street. As a boy Vanderbilt had begun with a single sailboat ferrying passengers from Staten Island to downtown Manhattan. More sailboats allowed him to expand into barges and then steamer transportation on the rivers. He was the first to understand that the future belonged to railroads, as the Union rushed the construction of military rail lines running east to west along the northern edge of the Confederacy. At length Vanderbilt commanded a rail empire that reached from New York to Chicago.
As you approach Grand Central from the south along Park Avenue, what you see is in a sense a monument to the Commodore.
The facade is a Roman triumphal arch, symbolizing the gateway to the City, its pairs of Corinthian columns flanking three enormous arched windows. These columns support an entablature at the center of which is a dominating sculpture group presenting the figures of Mercury, symbolic of commerce, and Minerva, goddess of intellect. A huge clock stands at the center of the group, since time is the essence of transportation.
The interior lives up to this magnificent facade. Passing through the waiting room — itself an impressive space though still not fully renovated — you enter the enormous vault, 470 feet long and 125 feet high, of the main concourse, based upon the model of the Roman baths, a large civic space full of hurry and buzz, the modern equivalent of an ancient town square. From the now cleansed arched windows on either end, diagonals of light shine into the vast vault.
No one, not even today's commuters hurrying along, can pass through this space without experiencing the presence of a powerful architectural will, a will analogous to that of the men who built the great railroads.
Today, thanks to the architectural firm of Bever, Blinder, and Belle, which oversaw the renovation, the visitor will find the interior reborn. Perhaps it has even been improved beyond its pristine state when the station opened in 1913. The blue-green ceiling of the vault has been completely cleared of grime and restored, small light-bulbs marking the figures of the Zodiac within the depths of the heavens. Gone now are the drab shops that used to line the corridors to Lexington Avenue — dismal hot-dog stands, pizza and pretzel parlors, tacky novelty sellers, as well as the 'homeless' people who monopolized the benches in the waiting room. In their place we will soon have dozens of upscale stores with glistening windows: Citarella, Banana Republic, Discovery Channel, Starbucks, City Bakery, jewelry stores, fine clothiers. In the main concourse, on the north balcony, Michael Jordan's New York Steakhouse has opened, and Cipriani Dolci and Metrazur will follow later this year; two chevron-painted circular bars flank the entry of Michael Jordan's, with beyond them public dining areas with a rosewood ceiling. A new marble staircase has been constructed on the east end of the concourse to complement the staircase on the west, requiring the reopening of a Tennessee quarry.
The rebirth of Grand Central is rich in symbolism. When it opened 85 years ago, the place represented the energies of the previous century's industrial America, already a world power with its coal, iron, and petroleum. The end of this century, with its emphasis on high technology, service, and consumption, is reflected in lighter, more refined tastes, yet these have been combined effectively with the symbols of the industrial past.
More locally, the renovated Grand Central symbolized the strong sense of civic rebirth that has been growing during the past few years, certainly because of prosperity but also because of the energetic administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani —?cleaner streets, less crime, less obtrusive 'homeless' people, no race riots, demagogues mostly quiescent, a sense, not altogether illusory, of greater general politeness. Set against the memory of Pennsylvania Station, the renovation of Grand Central reminds us that a dynamic economy can not only destroy in order to make way for the new, but also preserve what is valuable in the past.
Above all, maybe, here is the external hope of art: that by demonstrating excellence, or even merely the good, it will define the bad and encourage its rejection not only in art but, so the ancient belief goes, also in morality and politics.