The Grand Tour

This past week my mom and I embarked upon a whirlwind touring spree of the city.  The first one (and one of my favorites) was of Grand Central.  Knowing nothing about the building going into the tour, I managed to not only orient myself (with the exception of where the metro exits lead up to, on those I still take a random guess and follow the suits to the great hall- but to be fair the metro was not covered on the tour) but also have a newfound respect for the building itself.  I'll give a few of the tour highlights:

1. Grand Central not too long ago went through a complete restoration that pretty much was just washing the grime off of everything with soap and water.  Before this, the powers that be had just left it without any maintenance in the hopes that New Yorkers would determine it was outdated and needed to come down.  This way they could build larger and more profitable buildings in its place.  This tactic sadly worked for Penn Station.  Finally they did go for the restoration and cleaned the entire place... almost.  They actually left a small square on the ceiling of the great hall uncleaned so that you can see the difference.  If you check out the picture I posted and follow the line that runs through the crab down to the bottom right of the photo, just to the left of where the line comes to an end is the small dirty rectangle.  

2. The entire building of Grand Central is three stories up from the ground.  In fact, a good chunk of Park Avenue is three stories up.  There is an entire train yard down there.  The buildings are rooted through the pavement on steel beams.  This is why the ground shakes so much on Park.  Also, it is why you can't take an elevator in the buildings in that area until you take an escalator up to the second floor (elevators require one floor of space below the bottom level for all the mechanical parts).  If you walk out on Park Avenue and look East or West you can see that you are up on a hill.  It's not a natural hill, it is because you are on a platform hovering above an entire train yard!

3.  There are translucent catwalks between the East and West walls of the great hall.  These are here because original plans of the terminal called for a luxury hotel to be built on top, and it would help guests walk through without having to go into the terminal.  But for some reason it was never built.  You used to be able to walk through them on yours, but unfortunately they have been closed to the public since 9/11.