Main Concourse
The Main Concourse is the primary concourse of Grand Central Terminal, a railway station in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The space is located at the center of the terminal's station building.
The distinctive architecture and design of the Main Concourse helped earn several landmark designations for the station, including as a National Historic Landmark. The concourse, along with some other interior spaces, has been protected as an interior New York City Landmark since 1980. The room's Beaux-Arts design incorporates numerous works of art. The terminal is one of the world's ten most-visited tourist attractions, with 21.6 million visitors in 2018, excluding train and subway passengers.
The Main Concourse is located on the upper platform level of Grand Central, in the geographical center of the station building. The concourse leads directly to most of the terminal's upper-level tracks, although some are accessed from passageways near the concourse. The Main Concourse is usually filled with bustling crowds and is often used as a meeting place.
Opened with the rest of the terminal in 1913, the Main Concourse held numerous events, exhibitions, and other attractions over the next decades. In World War II, its east balcony became a United Service Organizations canteen. In 1944, its ceiling proved to be damaged beyond repair, and was covered over with a false ceiling, replicating the artistry of the original work. In 1967, the first train departure display was installed in the Main Concourse. The display, affectionately known as the Big Board, was replaced with more modern equipment several times. In the mid-20th century, the room started to deteriorate, its windows were darkened, advertisements were installed on its walls, and bank kiosks were placed on its floor. In the late 1990s, a restoration project overhauled the terminal, restoring the concourse nearly to its 1913 appearance. The biggest change was the addition of the east staircase, an element planned but never implemented until then. No major changes have been made since the overhaul finished in 1998.
Layout and architecture
The Main Concourse, on the terminal's upper platform level, is located in the geographical center of the station building. The cavernous concourse measures long by wide by high; a total of about. Its vastness was meant to evoke the terminal's "grand" status.The Main Concourse was deliberately placed at the same level as the mezzanine of the New York City Subway's Grand Central–42nd Street station; at the time of the terminal's construction, 80 percent of passengers transferred to and from the subway. The remainder of Grand Central Terminal was then designed around the floor level of the Main Concourse.
Iconography
Many parts of the Main Concourse and rest of the terminal are adorned with sculpted oak leaves and acorns, nuts of the oak tree. Cornelius Vanderbilt chose the acorn as the symbol of the Vanderbilt family, and adopted the saying "Great oaks from little acorns grow" as the family motto. Among these decorations is a brass acorn finial atop the four-sided clock in the center of the Main Concourse. Other acorn or oak leaf decorations include carved wreaths under the Main Concourse's west stairs; sculptures above the lunettes in the concourse; metalwork above the elevators; reliefs above the train gates; and the electric chandeliers in the Main Waiting Room and Main Concourse. These decorations were designed by Sylvain Salières.The overlapping letters "G", "C", and "T" are sculpted into multiple places in the Main Concourse and terminal, including in friezes atop several windows above the terminal's ticket office. The symbol was designed with the "T" resembling an upside-down anchor, intended as a reference to Cornelius Vanderbilt's commercial beginnings in shipping and ferry businesses. In 2017, the MTA based its new logo for the terminal on the engraved design; MTA officials said its black and gold colors have long been associated with the terminal. The spur of the letter "G" has a depiction of a railroad spike. The 2017 logo succeeded one created by the firm Pentagram for the terminal's centennial in 2013. It depicted the Main Concourse's ball clock set to 7:13, or 19:13 using a 24-hour clock, referencing the terminal's completion in 1913. Both logos omit the word "terminal" in its name, in recognition to how most people refer to the building.
Information booth and clock
The 18-sided main information booth is in the center of the concourse. Its attendants provide train schedules and other information to the public; in 2015, they fielded more than 1,000 questions an hour, according to an MTA spokesman. A door within the marble and brass pagoda conceals a spiral staircase down to a similar booth on the station's Dining Concourse. The Main Concourse booth originally had a simple counter surrounding the enclosed staircase and clock, though by the end of 1914 the entire booth was enclosed with a glass roof, and eventually with window panels on its sides.The booth is topped by a four-faced brass clock, one of Grand Central's most recognizable icons. The clock was designed by Henry Edward Bedford and cast in Waterbury, Connecticut. Its mechanism was designed by the Self Winding Clock Company and built by the Seth Thomas Clock Company, along with several other clocks in the terminal. Each face is made from opalescent glass, now often called opal glass or milk glass. An urban legend, which arose in news reports in the 1990s or even earlier, claimed that the clock faces were actually made of opal, a precious gem, and that renowned auction houses had estimated their worth at millions of dollars. This myth was spread by tour guides in the terminal, by its presentation as fact in Wikipedia from 2006 to 2013, and by major news publications into the present day. It was debunked by Untapped New York in 2020.
The clock was first stopped for repairs in 1954, after it was found to be losing a minute or two per day. One of the four original clock faces was damaged in 1968 by a police officer's bullet, while he chased members of the Youth International Party who staged a protest inside the terminal. The cracked face was removed in the 1990s during the terminal's restoration. It was replaced with a replica; the original is now part of the New York Transit Museum collection.
Along with the rest of the New York Central Railroad system's clocks, it was formerly set to a clock in the train dispatcher's office at Grand Central. Through the 1980s, they were set to a master clock at a workshop in Grand Central. Since 2004, they have been set to the United States Naval Observatory's atomic clock, accurate to a billionth of a second.
Departure and gate boards
The terminal's primary departure board is located on the south side of the concourse, installed directly atop the two sets of ticket windows. Colloquially known as the "Big Board", it shows the track and status of arriving and departing trains.There have been five departure boards used over the terminal's history: the 1913–1967 chalkboard, the 1967–1985 Solari board, the 1985–1996 Omega board, the 1996–2019 LCD board, and the 2019 fully digital display. For the first 54 years of the terminal's operation, train arrival and departure information was hand-chalked on a blackboard. The blackboard still hangs as a relic in its original place in the Biltmore Room, but in 1967, its function was supplanted by an electromechanical display in the main concourse over the ticket windows. This new display, dubbed a Solari board after its Italian manufacturer Solari di Udine, showed train information on rows of flip panels that made a distinctive flapping sound as they rotated to reflect changes. In 1985, the Solari board was replaced with the more technologically advanced Omega board, with flip panels controlled by a computer database of train information instead of manual inputs. It was built by watchmaker Omega SA to a design by Advanced Computer Systems of Dayton, Ohio, which also installed it. This board was removed during a terminal renovation in July 1996; it was replaced several months later with liquid-crystal displays that replicated the analog look of the older boards, yet were the first to span over both the east and west ticket offices. Between March and September 2019, the LCD boards — whose software had become unavailable — were removed from their housings and replaced by LED video wall screens. Designed by the MTA and New York's State Historic Preservation Office, the LED displays are brighter, easier to read, and ADA-compliant; they are also the first of the boards to offer real-time updates to train information. Commuter complaints about the new displays were published in the news, as had complaints over the three prior board replacements, in 1967, 1985, and 1996.
There are also arrival and departure displays at each of the platform gates, about 93 in total. Originally these were cloth curtains with train information stitched onto them, posted at the platform entrances. The signs were eventually replaced with flip panels, replaced again with the installation of the Omega Board in 1987, and supplanted again by LCD panels, which were replaced between 2017 and 2020.