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Grand Central by William Middleton The world's greatest railway terminal DJ
Grand Central by William Middleton The worlds greatest railway terminal with dust jacket. over 220 illustrations, drawings, architectural reproductions, more. 1977, 3rd printing 1981 160 pages indexed.
CONTENTS
Foreword 6
Chapter 1 — The Railroad Comes to Manhattan 11
Chapter 2 — The Commodore's Palace on 42nd Street 21
Chapter 3 — An Engineer and His Grand Design 53
Chapter 4 — The Architects and Their Magnificent Structure 63
Chapter 5 — A Prodigious Task Wonderfully Accomplished 81
Chapter 6 — A City Within a City 93
Chapter 7 — Gateway to a Continent 107
Chapter 8 — What Future for Grand Central? 131
Appendix 143
Bibliography 154
Index 157
DUST JACKET INTRODUCTION
WITH
MORE THAN 220 ILLUSTRATIONS
Drawings — Architectural Reproductions -- Bibliography — Index When the New York Central Railroad threw Open the doors of its splendid new Manhattan terminal on 42nd Street on February 2, 1913, newspaper and magazine writers of the time were hard pressed to find superlatives equal to the task of describing it. Both The New York Times and the New York Evening Post published special sections detailing the new terminal's splendid facilities in glowing terms. The New York Evening Sun described it as a "twentieth century triumph of magnitude, ingenuity, and convenience." Scientific American called it "a monumental gateway to America's greatest city." But it was perhaps best described by William Inglis in Harper's Weekly as, the consumation of a prodigious task, wonderfully accomplished." And, in truth, it was everything they said it was, for Grand Central Terminal represented an extraordinary and unequalled merging of an inspired work of civil engineering, a landmark achievement for the still-young profession of electrical engineering, and a distinguished example of functional architecture. Almost a half century after it was built, architectural historian Carroll L. V. Meeks was to call it " one of the outstandingly successful stations of history."
The origin and history of New York's great terminal date, not from 1913, but from the very beginning of rail transportation on Manhattan, when the horse-drawn trains of the New York & Harlaem began running along the Bowery in 1832. From their first modest stations on lower Manhattan the New York & Harlem and the New Haven, which came to town over Harlem rails in 1849, moved uptown to progressively grander facilities, first to the station on Fourth Avenue between 26th and 27th that later became the first Madison Square Garden, and then up to 42nd Street to join the trains of the New York & Hudson River in the splendid Grand Central Depot completed by Commodore Vanderbilt in 1871. Said to be patterned after the Tuileries, the Commodore's red brick palace on 42nd Street had a great arched train shed that was the largest interior space on the continent, and it was ranked second only to the National Capitol as a tourist attraction, but increasing rail traffic soon taxed even its capabilities. Subsequent enlargement, and a complete rebuilding of 1898-1900, proved inadequate to meet the city's growing needs", setting the stage for the construction of the present Grand Central Terminal, an enormously difficult undertaking that took fully a decade to complete. The genius of engineer William J. Wilgus and architects Charles A. Reed and Whitney Warren produced a Grand Central design that was not only an inspired solution to a difficult set of operating conditions and a brilliant work of architecture, but that also made Grand Central the center and catalyst for the dynamic growth and development of a major urban area of mid-town Manhattan. Today, Grand Central continues to perform that function no less well than it did more than 60 years ago at the time of its completion.
In this richly illustrated book William a Middleton traces the colorful history of this most famous of New York's great public buildings from the first run of the New York & Harlaem's horse-drawn trains of 1832 to the architectural landmarks controversy of today, and considers some of the possible new roles in New York City transportation for this extraordinarily useful and adaptable terminal.
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