In forty years from the day it was opened, the last vestige of the Grand Central depot, a building which, to a considerable portion of the population of this land, had been second in fame only to the Capitol at Washington, was gone. Workmen had torn it stone from stone and brick from brick and carted it off as waste to scrap yards. The majesty of that lovely vaulted train shed had been reduced to a pile of rusty and useless iron. It had been outgrown and discarded.
In fact within a dozen years after its christening the wonderful depot was overtaxed. Even Vanderbilt’s vision could not grasp the growth that was coming, not only to New York, but to the great territory his railroads served. In a dozen years workmen were clearing a broad space to the east of the main structure for an annex train shed of a half-dozen tracks, to relieve the pressure upon the original station. Another twelve years and the laborers were again upon the Grand Central, this time adding stories to the original structure and trying to simplify its operation by new baggage and waiting rooms. Within the third dozen years the workmen were busy with air drill and steam shovel digging the great hole in the rock that was the first notice to the old Grand Central that its short lease of busy life was ending. And in the fortieth year of its life they were tearing down the old station—old within the span of two generations—old only because it had been outgrown.
The problem of the new Grand Central was both engineering and architectural. It is the engineering side of the problem which interests us here and now. It was that side which it was necessary to solve first. To solve it meant that the passenger traffic into New York from the north and east for another fifty or a hundred years must be discounted—not an easy matter when in the case of a single famous trunk-line railroad it has been found that the passenger traffic has doubled each ten years for the past three decades. When the statisticians put down their pencils the engineers whistled. To fashion a station for the traffic of 1960, even for that of 1935, meant such a passenger station as no railroad head, no engineer, no architect had ever before dreamed of building. At a low estimate, it meant that there would have to be some forty or fifty stub-tracks in the train shed. In the great train shed of the Union Station of St. Louis, there are thirty-two of these stub-tracks and the span of that shed is 606 feet. That would have meant in the case of the new Grand Central a train house with a width of nearly a thousand feet. The engineers shook their heads. They knew their limitations—with the Grand Central hedged in by the most expensive real estate in the city of New York. To buy any large quantity of adjoining land for the new station was quite out of the question.
Fortunately there was a way out. There generally is. The electric locomotive had begun to come into its own. For the operation of this station, including the congested four-track tunnel under Park Avenue, from the very throat of the train-shed yard up to Harlem, four miles distant, it represented an almost ideal form of traction, largely because of its cleanliness and freedom from smoke. For the engineers who were giving their wits to the planning of a new terminal it was the solution of their hardest problem.
They would cut their train shed of fifty tracks about in half—and then place one of these halves directly above the other. This would make a fairly logical division between the through and the suburban traffic of the terminal. In that way the new Grand Central was planned. And that one thing represented its first important demarkation from the other great passenger stations of the land. It also is the thing that pointed the way to the most wonderful development of America’s most wonderful terminal, the thing that is infinitely greater than the station itself.
Recall once again, if you will, that dirty smoke-filled yard at the portals of the old station. It was rather an impressive place; by night, with its flashing signals of red and green and yellow, its glare of dominant headlights and the constant unspoken orders of swinging lamps; by day, a seeming chaos of locomotives and of cars, turning this way or that, slipping into the dark cool train shed under grinding brakes, or else starting from that giant cavern with gathering speed, to roll halfway across the continent before the final halt. To the layman it was fascinating, because he knew that the chaos was really ordered, on a scientific and tremendous scale, that the alert little man who stood at the levers of the inconspicuous tower mid-yard, was the clear-minded human who was directing the working of a great terminal by the working of his brain. But to the thinking railroader that railroad yard, like every railroad yard in the heart of the great city, was a waste that was hardly less than criminal.
The coming of the electric locomotive has spelled the way by which that waste in the hearts of our American cities may be ended. Concretely, in the case of the new Grand Central, it made a splendid solution of one of the greatest of the growth problems in the largest city of our continent. For, while the new Grand Central, service and approach yards considered even as a single level—some sixty acres all told—are larger than the older yard, they apparently have disappeared. In that thing alone a great obstacle to the constant uptown growth of New York has been removed. Sixteen precious city blocks have been given back to the city for its development. And already a group of buildings possessing rare architectural unity and beauty have begun to rise upon this tract.
There are other American cities where this experiment—no longer an experiment, if you please—might well be effected today. Of these, more in a moment. For, before we leave the question of the Grand Central consider one other thing: the economic value of its design to the railroad company which has erected it. It was only a moment ago that we were speaking of the utter extravagance shown in the designing and building of the monumental passenger stations in so many of our metropolitan cities. The New York Central, for reasons of its own, has been reticent in stating both the cost of the new Grand Central and the income which it derives not only from the rentals of the privileges in the station itself—restaurants, news stands, barber shops, checking stands, and the like—but also from the ground rental of the great group of huge buildings which it has permitted to spring up over its electrified station yards. It is known, however, that this income is not only sufficient to pay the interest upon the investment of the new terminal, to provide slowly but surely a sinking fund for the retirement of the bonds which have been issued for the building of the terminal, but also to go a considerable distance toward the actual operating expenses of the terminal.
Here, then, is the first of our giant opportunities for the railroader of tomorrow. There is, of course, no novelty in rentals from ordinary station privileges. The Pennsylvania Railroad, by the development of the electric locomotive, was enabled to tunnel both the Hudson and the East rivers and thus to realize its dream of long years—a terminal situated in the heart of Manhattan Island; a passenger terminal so situated as to place the great railroad of the red cars in a real competitive position with the railroad of the Vanderbilts, which so long had held exclusive terminal facilities within the congested island of Manhattan. The Pennsylvania did not do the thing by halves—it rarely does; it built what is beyond the shadow of a doubt the most beautiful railroad station in America, if not in the entire world. The majesty of its waiting room is such as to make it perhaps the loveliest apartment in all these United States.