Two towers that almost replaced Grand Central

When Grand Central Terminal was built in 1913, the architects of the Beaux Arts train station expected it to be the base of a skyscraper someday.

In the 1950s developers proposed one. The tower design they commissioned had the space-age name the Hyperboloid: a wasp-waist, 80-story structure (at left) created by one of the century’s most innovative architects.

“Working for developers Webb & Knapp, I.M. Pei proposed an 80-story tower with a circular footprint and, thanks to a taper halfway up the shaft, an hourglass profile,” explains skyscraperpage.com.

“Its facade was crisscrossed by structural supports; overall the building resembled a bundle of sticks. At the base of Pei’s building, and again in its upper levels, the floors were left open and the structure was left exposed.

“Grand Central Terminal would have been demolished to make room for the tower, just as Penn Station was demolished a few years later to make room for Two Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden.”

Plans for the Hyperboloid, of course, never came to pass. But it wouldn’t be the only tower proposed for the Grand Central Terminal site.

Air rights were sold to another developer in the 1960s, and architect Marcel Breuer came up with this (very Pan Am Building-like) skyscraper, which would sit on top of the terminal (at right).

By then, Grand Central had been deemed a historic landmark by the Landmarks Commission. A fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1978 resulted in Breuer’s tower getting permanently derailed.

[Second image: The Architecture of Additions, by Paul Spencer Byard, via City Review]

What was lost when we lost Penn Station

The demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station in October 1963 is considered a city tragedy, a “monumental act of vandalism,” as The New York Times put it at the time.

It was also a catalyst for the preservation movement that’s saved countless buildings from also ending up in pieces in a Meadowlands dump.

Photos of the 1910 Beaux-Arts masterpiece are in no short supply. But have you ever really looked at them and contrasted the images with the Penn Station of today?

Here’s the original Penn Station main waiting room, above in 1911, inspired by glorious ancient Roman baths.

Imagine waiting for your train there, next to one of six Doric columns under a 150-foot high ceiling, with sunlight pouring through the lunette windows.

Here’s the Penn Station waiting room today, above right. Hmmm.

Then there’s the main concourse, where passengers would go to buy tickets before descending the stairs to their trains.

The original was made of glass and steel, reminiscent of train sheds in Europe.

This is it above, in 1962, a year before it was torn down.

Here’s the concourse now, an ugly blur of fluorescent lights.

Have you ever seen Grand Central like this?

Empty of pedestrians, cars, taxis, and traffic, especially during daylight hours, that is. The image comes from a 1920s postcard of the terminal, not long after it opened in 1913.

Check out this grainy photo of the original Grand Central Depot, in the 1870s, with real live cows grazing in front of it—a glimpse of the city’s rural recent past.

More cross streets carved into tenement corners

Before you could Google-map your location on your smart phone, and even before every corner of the city had accurate signs, these chiseled street names came in pretty handy, letting you know where you were.

Mostly you see them in tenement-heavy neighborhoods like the East Village, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side.

Brownstone and tenement Brooklyn have plenty too, like this faded old carving at Underhill Avenue and Bergen Street in Prospect Heights.

Not all cross street carvings are in neighborhoods once poor or working-class. One of the loveliest of all is at University Place and “Twelfth Street East,” done up Beaux-Arts style.