Grand Central Terminal: How to Actually Use It

It is not Grand Central Station. That’s a post office nearby, and using the wrong name will earn mild corrections from New Yorkers. Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913 at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, handles around 750,000 people daily, and is both a functioning transit hub and one of the finest Beaux-Arts buildings in America.

The ceiling of the Main Concourse is the most famous detail: 38 metres high at the vault, painted turquoise with the zodiac constellations in gold. The constellations are depicted in reverse, as they would appear looking down from outside the celestial sphere rather than from Earth. The error was noticed soon after the building opened. The explanation that it was intentional was invented. The explanation has been the official position since 1913.

The Building Itself

You arrive properly from the Lexington Avenue subway, ascending through the terminal’s ramping corridors into the main concourse. The ramps were designed to move 35,000 passengers per hour without bottlenecks: the original engineers calculated human flow rates and built the infrastructure accordingly.

The Oyster Bar on the lower level has been serving seafood here since the terminal opened. Pan roasts, Manhattan clam chowder, oysters from multiple East Coast sources, all under the tiled arched ceiling of the lower level. Not cheap (mains $40-60) but genuinely among the few remaining places in New York that transport you to another era without feeling like a recreation. The outer corridor leading to it demonstrates the “whispering gallery”: stand at one corner and whisper into the wall; someone at the diagonal corner 15 metres away can hear you clearly.

The Campbell, a bar in the former office of 1920s financier John W. Campbell, has the original ceiling frescoes and vault. A cocktail here in the evening is reliably worth 45 minutes.

Grand Central Market along the lower level passage has produce, cheese, wine, and prepared food stalls. Murray’s Cheese has a counter here; the quality is good.

Practical Notes

Grand Central serves Metro-North commuter rail to Westchester, Connecticut, and upstate New York. It does not serve Amtrak, long-distance trains use Penn Station on 34th Street. The 4/5/6 and 7 subway lines stop here; the shuttle to Times Square runs from the terminal’s west end.

The terminal is open to the public 5:30am to 2am daily. It is heated, has restrooms, and is one of the better places in Midtown to sit without spending money.

The Municipal Art Society runs free walking tours of the terminal on Wednesdays at 12:30pm, departing from the information booth at the centre of the main concourse. These cover details you would miss independently: the architectural logic of the traffic flow systems, the social history of how different classes of traveller were routed through different sections, the technical story of the 1970s campaign to prevent demolition (which was real; Penn Station had just been torn down and the terminal was seriously threatened).