Читать книгу Antiquity in Gotham - Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis - Страница 17

Grand Central Terminal,⁶⁴ the terminus of the New York Central and Hudson Railroad, was constructed between 1903 and 1913. It too used the language of classical architecture to design a truly awesome terminal. New York Central Railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s great rival, was the creation of “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, who got his start operating ferries to and from Manhattan. In the 1860s he consolidated his holdings in railroads, first buying the New York and Harlem Railroad and then the Hudson Line, as well as acquiring stock in the New York Central Railroad (which ran from Albany to Buffalo), in an attempt to extend his railroad empire westward across the United States. While expanding his network of railroads, the commodore recognized the need for a terminal to consolidate his passenger operations and selected the Harlem Railroad’s property at Forty-Second Street, near the city’s northern most edge.

The terminal was intended to convey and symbolize Vanderbilt’s successes in the railroads.⁶⁵ Completed in 1871, the Grand Central Depot was the largest rail complex in the world, even surpassing London’s St. Pancras. Built in the French Second Empire style, its façade looked a great deal like the Louvre⁶⁶ and hid a monumental train shed. The terminal was an immediate success, with more than 4 million passengers passing through its doors during the first year of operation.⁶⁷ As train travel increased, a three-story addition to the terminal was erected, and the waiting rooms were reconfigured. While these modifications facilitated the flow of passengers in the station, it did not solve the fundamental problem of too few platforms to serve the ever-increasing number of passengers.

An 1899 New York Times editorial complained that Grand Central was “one of the most inconvenient and unpleasant railroad stations in the whole country.”⁶⁸ These criticisms prompted discussion about the creation of a new terminal, but only a tragedy made the new terminal a reality. At this time, steam-powered trains accessed Grand Central Terminal via tunnels. Smoke and steam filled these tunnels, creating conditions with limited or no visibility, thereby setting the stage for disaster. On the morning of January 8, 1902, a train from White Plains ignored stop signals and warning lights and crashed into the 8:17 commuter train from Danbury, Connecticut, which waited in the Park Avenue tunnel at Fifty-Eighth Street, killing fifteen and injuring others. As a result, New York City and the State of New York outlawed the use of all steam engines south of the Harlem River, that is, on all of Manhattan, effective on July 1, 1908.

The New York Central Railroad now needed an innovative solution for what seemed an intractable problem.⁶⁹ William J. Wilgus, the self-trained chief engineer of New York Central, developed a series of practical design solutions that enabled Grand Central Terminal to remain in its desirable location at Forty-Second Street, to build a new terminal, and to solve the problem caused by the ban on steam engines in Manhattan. First, Wilgus expanded the terminal vertically, stacking the two terminals one atop the other, thereby increasing capacity without expanding the terminal’s horizontal footprint. Second, he realized that New York Central’s trains needed to be electrified. His ingenious solution to pay for these innovations was to sell the air rights above the new underground terminal, making Wilgus among the first to sell air rights. He proposed erecting a fifteen-story office building on the site of the old terminal building and train shed, which would produce $1.35 million in annual rental income, covering much of the cost of burying the tracks, improving the train yard, and electrifying the trains.⁷⁰ New York Central’s board of directors unanimously approved his plan, and the terminal was constructed with almost all of the elements Wilgus had enumerated.⁷¹

FIGURE 11. Forty-Second Street façade, Grand Central Terminal, Manhattan, 2008.

Source: Eric Baetscher (CC BY-SA 3.0).

D. H. Burnham and Company; McKim, Mead & White; Samuel Huckel; and Reed and Stem were invited to submit designs for the new terminal. Reed and Stem had the inside track, as Wilgus was married to Charles Reed’s sister. Impressed with Reed and Stem’s work on local stations for New York Central, Wilgus advocated on their behalf,⁷² and unsurprisingly, Reed and Stem’s design was selected. Whitney Warren, an École des Beaux-Arts–trained architect and designer of the New York Yacht Club, also wanted this commission. He moved in New York’s most elevated social circles and lobbied his cousin, William K. Vanderbilt, to have his firm, Warren and Wetmore, appointed as the architects of the new terminal. Despite winning the competition, Reed and Stem were ordered to work with Warren and Wetmore, and the Associated Architects of Grand Central was formed. Although Whitney Warren remains most closely associated with the design of Grand Central Terminal, the final design was the result of the two firms’ unhappy union.⁷³

The architecture of imperial Rome, with its vast interiors and monumental scale, brought a grandeur to Grand Central Terminal that no other architectural style could offer, and nowhere is this clearer than in the Forty-Second Street façade (Figure 11). Whitney Warren drew an analogy between his grand terminal and the triumphal arches of old, declaring:

In ancient times, the entrance to the city was through an opening in the walls or fortifications. This portal was usually decorated and elaborated into an Arch of Triumph.… The city of to-day has no wall surrounding that may serve, by elaboration, as a pretext to such glorification, but none the less the gateway must exist and in the case of New York City and other cities it is through a tunnel which discharges the human flow into the very centre of the town.… Such is the Grand Central Terminal, and the motive of its façade is an attempt to offer a tribute to the glory of commerce as exemplified by that institution.⁷⁴

A massive sculptural group stood atop the terminal’s south façade, as if surmounting a triumphal arch. Created by Jules Alexis Coutan, Progress, Mental and Physical Force weighs 1,500 tons and stands fifty feet tall.⁷⁵ At the center of the group is the world’s largest Tiffany clock. Appropriately perched on the clock is Mercury. Embodying the spirit of the place and the New York Central Railroad, he watches over the travelers and merchants passing through the terminal. Accompanying him are Hercules, who embodies physical force, and Minerva, who embodies mental force—both requirements for a successful railroad and a successful city. A monumental eagle, the symbol of ancient Rome and the United States, spreads his wings behind Mercury.

The main concourse (275 × 120 feet) was just as impressive as the south façade (Figure 12). It is a soaring architectural symphony of warm golden hues and cerulean blue. It has ninety-foot-tall double windows with functional walkways between them. On the cavernous ceiling (125 feet tall) is displayed a seemingly infinite mural of the constellations.⁷⁶ Warren and Paul Helleu devised the mural, which was executed by J. Monroe Hewlett and Charles Basing, with the help of astronomers and painting assistants.⁷⁷ Two thousand five hundred stars were painted into the sky, and sixty of these stars were painted in varying shades of gold to create a twinkling effect, which was further enhanced by the five clerestory windows on each side of the concourse, effectively bringing the heavens into the building.⁷⁸ New York City received its second grand entrance when the terminal opened to celebrations and fanfare on Sunday, February 2, 1913, at 12:01 AM.

The creation of such a terminal and concourse reflects the artistic, architectural, and cultural values of the United States at this moment in time. It was the peak of the influence of the Beaux-Arts, which used classical forms extensively in art and architecture, and of the City Beautiful movement, whose proponents advocated that good architecture and design could improve the lives of and uplift urban dwellers.⁷⁹ By facilitating a better commuting experience, the design of Grand Central Terminal also fulfilled the practical considerations of a terminal that needed to circulate large numbers of people. Like the Roman baths, there are multiple entrances in and out of the terminal. Not only could one walk through the main concourse, but a series of ramps allow one to avoid the main concourse if entering from Forty-Second Street. This practical design facilitated the easy movement of passengers through the station. Twenty-three million people passed through Grand Central Terminal in 1913, and by 1926, this number had doubled to 43 million.⁸⁰ In 2018, over 750,000 people passed through Grand Central each day.⁸¹

FIGURE 12. Concourse, Grand Central Terminal, Manhattan, 2015.

Source: MTA (CC BY 2.0).

Grand Central Terminal was landmarked on August 2, 1967, by the newly established Landmarks Preservation Commission. However, only a year later, when Penn Central, the amalgamated company formed of the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads, leased Grand Central Terminal to UGP Properties, Inc., the developer proposed erecting a fifty-five-story tower, designed by Marcel Breuer, directly on top of Grand Central Terminal. While the Forty-Second Street façade would have been preserved, the main waiting room and most of the concourse would have been destroyed. After a decade of legal wrangling, the US Supreme Court upheld Grand Central Terminal’s landmark status in 1978, thereby saving the building.

Grand Central Terminal’s survival, partially ensured through Pennsylvania Station’s tragic demise, was also due to the very public interest taken in the building’s survival by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Ed Koch, later the mayor of New York. Mrs. Onassis acknowledged the value of Grand Central Terminal, writing, “Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?”⁸² The former first lady was right; buildings like Grand Central are a testament of great civilizations and their great cities. Between 1988 and 1998, Metro-North started on a major restoration of Grand Central Terminal. Today, the terminal is a destination in its own right, where one can dine or shop for gourmet food, clothes, or an array of electronic gadgets.

Conclusions

Without good infrastructure, a city can still function, but it cannot achieve its full potential. A grid, a safe and consistent supply of clean water, bridges, and train stations are vital parts of New York’s infrastructure. To construct these necessities, New York City’s architects, patrons, and engineers looked to the forms, designs, and ideas of the art and architecture of ancient Egypt and classical antiquity, especially that of imperial Rome, for suitable technical and architectural models. The grid of classical antiquity provided an orderly plan for New York City’s growth up the island of Manhattan. Egyptian architecture, with its overtones of solidity, strength, and technological advancement, offered the appropriate resonance and forms for the distributing reservoir in the 1830s. The demise of the once much-fêted Egyptian reservoir underscores how engagements with antiquity and its architecture were both specific and changeable. New Yorkers looked to the different architectures of the ancient Mediterranean world at various times: Egypt’s connotations of technological innovation, tapped in the 1840s to convey New York’s arrival as a modern metropolis, were replaced by the imperial majesty of Rome a mere sixty years later.

Ancient architecture provided attractive aesthetic and artistic models as well as design and structural models. McKim’s examination of the design of the Baths of Caracalla helped him determine how to move commuters effectively through Pennsylvania Station, while the sloping walls of the Murray Hill reservoir worked to counterbalance the force of the water. The large thermal windows of Grand Central and Penn Station allowed in light, and, in the case of Grand Central, these windows opened to allow breezes for ventilation and cooling. The arch and colonnade of the Manhattan Bridge had both a functional and aesthetic purpose. It facilitated the movement of people and vehicular traffic on and off the island of Manhattan while also creating an attractive approach to the bridge. Utility and beauty were not at odds in the design of ancient architecture or in New York’s architecture; instead, they worked in concert. The repurposing of the Farley Post Office as the new Amtrak and Long Island Railroad station at Pennsylvania Station speaks to the powerful afterlife of ancient architecture. The timeless and flexible nature of these forms also meant that ancient architecture had a great appeal to New Yorkers when they constructed the civic institutions that were essential: custom houses, courts, and municipal buildings, the topic of the next chapter.