Grand Central Terminal

“Grand Central Terminal officially opened to great fanfare at 12:01 am on Sunday, February 2, 1913, and more than 150,000 people visited the new terminal on its opening day. Although construction was not yet entirely complete, Grand Central Terminal had arrived and New York City would never be the same again.

With Grand Central acting as an anchor, development around the terminal took off. Between 1913 and 1917, the Biltmore Hotel, the Yale Club, and two office buildings were constructed on railroad property across Vanderbilt Avenue. During the 1920’s, as hotels and apartment buildings began to rise on the “air rights” tracts of Park Avenue, skyscrapers simultaneously sprang up along East 42nd Street. Warehouses gave way to the 56-story Chanin Building, the 54-story Lincoln Building and the 77-story Chrysler Building. On Lexington Avenue, the Hotel Commodore opened in 1919, and the Eastern Offices Building - better known as the Graybar Building - was completed in 1927, each with a passageway connection to Grand Central’s Main Concourse.

As the neighborhood prospered, so did Grand Central. Grand Central Terminal, at various times, housed an art gallery, an art school, a newsreel movie theater, a rail history museum, and innumerable temporary exhibitions. All the while, it remained the busiest train station in the country, with a bustling Suburban Concourse on the lower level and famous long-distance trains like the Fast Mail, the Water-Level Limited, the Wolverine, and the Twentieth Century Limited departing from its Main Concourse. In 1947, over 65 million people - the equivalent of 40% of the population of the United States - traveled the rails via Grand Central Terminal.” (History of Grand Central Terminal)