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Grand Central Terminal
DECEMBER 2005
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By Susan Orlean
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Photographs by Ira Block
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Every day more than 700,000 people hustle through Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. It's one of the biggest, deepest—and indeed grandest—train stations in the world.
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In Grand Central Terminal, people are lost and found. At the information booth—a gilded cupcake of a structure in the middle of the main concourse—they're mostly lost. They need to find their way to Poughkeepsie, Mamaroneck, the theater district, the bathroom. They've misplaced their cell phones, their maps, their tickets, their friends. They need someone, please, to show them how to get through Grand Central and how to get out. On a recent day Audrey Johnson was one of the two information officers working in the booth. Johnson is small and solid, with marcelled curls, carefully polished lips, and nearly perfect recall. The lost souls approach her window and lob a destination at her, and she returns it before it even bounces. As many as a thousand people an hour come to the booth, and only occasionally does Johnson peek at a schedule or reference book before setting them straight. The exchanges are fast and steady. They produce a kind of boogie-woogie rhythm. While she's working, Johnson jiggles her leg back and forth, keeping time.
"Garrison?"
"2:09, track 7."
A businessman, neat as a pin: "The next train to Stamford?"
"12:37 p.m., track 104."
A Hasidic teenager: "The way to Poughkeepsie?"
"Hudson line."
An elderly woman in a Donald Duck T-shirt saying I'M THE BOSS; her husband in a Michael Jordan jersey and support hose: "Brewster?"
"Track 39, five minutes."
A blonde, eating breath mints: "I'm meeting a guy, and all he said was, 'Meet me on 43rd Street.'" She looks pleadingly at Johnson, then walks away.
People are found at Grand Central too. It's rumored that most tourists and nearly all New Yorkers use the information booth as their fail-safe meeting place in case of disaster or dislocation. It is, after all, the center point of the place that feels most central in Manhattan—the place that is both totally public and yet still protected, that is both a main entry into Manhattan and a main way out.
Everything about the terminal is superlative. It's one of the biggest (49 acres) and the deepest (110 feet) as well as the busiest and the grand-est terminals in the world. On an average day 700,000 people—more than the entire population of North Dakota—pass in and out of Grand Central. Sitting for an hour in the information booth, hypnotized by the rush hour flow, I feel as if I truly have seen the entire population of North Dakota striding by. In fact, I feel like if I stood in the main concourse long enough, I would eventually see every person I have ever known in my life.
You could spend years in Grand Central before you discovered all its secrets: its Whispering Gallery, its Vanderbilt family emblems, its tennis courts, its hidden railroad cars, its private ground-floor apartment (now transformed into a retro cocktail lounge).
Dan Brucker, who fields media questions about the terminal, relishes its many mysteries. One afternoon he pries me away from my perch at the information booth and whisks me into the basement known as M-42, nine stories below the lowest floor that commuters ever see. Brucker is a smallish guy with glossy black hair, thick glasses, a quick smile, and a slightly manic comportment.
"This," he says gleefully, as the basement elevator groans to a stop, "is not just the deepest and the biggest but the most secret basement in the city. What's so secret about it? During World War II there were shoot-to-kill orders if you showed up down here. Why? I'll tell you why. Why is because this was where the power came from to move the trains for moving troops, that's why." The elevator door creaks open. Brucker dashes out, leading me into a dim room lined with humming steel boxes, the power plant for all rail traffic in the terminal. On one of the boxes I notice a little half-dollar-size red button with a modest label, Emergency Stop. Pressing the button would halt all movement on all tracks. Brucker eyes me as I look longingly at the red button. "Please, don't even think about it," he says. "Do you really want to make 125,000 people late for dinner?"
In Grand Central things are lost and found too. Nineteen thousand bits and pieces turn up in Lost and Found each year (of which more than 60 percent are eventually reunited with their owners). Like sherds of pottery in Pompeii, they describe the lives that course through the terminal. There are cell phones and iPods and umbrellas; there are diamond rings and bicycles and false teeth and books. Once an urn of human ashes was found (left deliberately by a woman whose dead husband disguised his extramarital affairs by saying he'd fallen asleep on the train); once a pair of earlobes (left by a plastic surgeon); once a mournful (but later reclaimed) basset hound.
Mike Nolan, the Lost and Found maestro, is tagging an errant BlackBerry when I stop in. He puts it aside to show me one of his favorite unclaimed items—a scale-model toy train, still in its box. It was, we decide, probably a gift that never found its way home. "Imagine," Nolan says, turning it around in his hands, "leaving a train on the train."
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