New York City’s Ingenious Use of Vertical Space

One of the things I love about New York City is the remarkable utilization of every square inch of space, from roommates carving one bedroom apartments into two to building a state park on top of a sewage plant. But my favorite block in NYC for ingenious use of space by far has to be Grand Central Terminal.

To be fair, Grand Central Terminal occupies far more than an ordinary city block, but that’s besides the point: it holds up as a conceptual unit of urban space, much like the city block; the normal course of pedestrian traffic passes through it without having to cross a street, another characteristic generally considered to define a city block; and more importantly, its utilization is truly breathtaking.

As you approach from the south, the first thing you notice is how majestic the Terminal building is. It is an artifact of New York City’s Gilded Age, conceptualized in 1902 to replace an aging Grand Central Depot, itself having undergone a massive expansion and rechristening as Grand Central Station only two years early, but already overwhelmed by the demands put upon it [1]— and completed in 1913. But let’s leave aside beauty for our current purposes, and just keep in mind that it exists. The first piece of ingenuity you notice is that while the Terminal forms an obstacle obstructing the main lanes of Park Avenue from continuing north past 42nd St, a ramp rises where Park’s island would otherwise be, at 40th St, carrying one lane of traffic in each direction above the pedestrians and the ground level and then around the Terminal, northbound traffic to the east and southbound traffic to the west. To the east, a second lane branches off to the Grand Hyatt, because of course there is a 26-story luxury hotel attached to Grand Central Terminal with passenger pick up and drop off on the second floor, access to the Terminal on the first floor, and of course a special direct entrance to the subway in the basement (interesting fact: this was Donald Trump’s first real estate project).

The best part of the viaduct however is on the north side, where it carves through the Helmsley building, depositing traffic right back onto Park Avenue at 46th St. This is the greatest example of vertical layering: you have a road that not only goes through a building in two separate places (to say nothing of the dozens of train tracks beneath the ground), but that makes 90 degree turns while doing so. It all seems to be so well planned, but in fact the viaduct was not proposed until three years after GCT had opened, and when it was built in 1919, it originally went only around the west side of the building, causing terrible traffic jams at its then-termination at 45th and Vanderbilt. It wasn’t until 1928–29 that the Helmsley building with the current viaduct ramps passing through it to 46th and Park was built.

The final piece of the genius of this block, at least at the macro level, is the MetLife Building. A lot has been said about how much New Yorkers hate it, although I suspect that might have been more true of an earlier generation. To me it seems to float above the Terminal, even though in reality it sits on a lot immediately to its north. The reason that New Yorkers of an earlier generation hated it so much is the same reason that I love it: it blocks the view of Park Avenue from either side, drawing the eyes down to Grand Central itself. What do I care if it is over 50 stories high? So is everything else in midtown these days.

These three aboveground layers — terminal, viaduct, skyscrapers; all built at different times, yet fitting together so seamlessly, as if they had always been meant to be — is what is so great about this city. And that is to say nothing of the 44 platforms which make Grand Central Terminal the largest train station in the world. This does not including the subway, but it does include the special track for presidential visitors …

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[1] If this reminds you of the expansion of traffic that follows the widening of roads, this is not entirely coincidental. Railroads were the highways of their time, and Grand Central was their nexus. In fact, it may actually have only been the pause placed on economic activity by WWI and the subsequent rise of the car as the new alpha mode of transportation that kept the rail terminal from being overrun yet a third time.

Originally published at jelpern.blogspot.com on July 13, 2012, in slightly modified form.