The meaning behind Grand Central’s chandeliers

Dropping from Vanderbilt Hall and other parts of Grand Central Terminal like heavenly jewels are spherical chandeliers—each with its light bulbs bare and exposed.

There’s a reason for this, and it stretches all the way back to the building’s construction and design at the turn of the last century.

The Vanderbilt family, which built this third version of Grand Central at 42nd Street, were “immensely proud of Grand Central’s status as one of the world’s first all-electric buildings,” states History.com.

Previously, train stations and the engines that went in and out of them were smoky and sooty, making them unpleasant—not to mention unsafe.

“In fact, their pride greatly influenced the station’s interior designs. When it first opened, every one of the stations chandeliers and lighting fixtures featured bare, exposed light bulbs—more than 4,000 of them.”

The chandeliers have changed over time; in 2008, the incandescent glow was replaced by fluorescent bulbs. But they continue to pay homage to the forward-thinking vision of the Vanderbilts and the era of quieter, cleaner, unadorned electricity.

Grand Central Terminal (never call it Station!) is a treasure of beautiful interiors. If you’ve ever noticed an acorn and leaf motif, that’s the Vanderbilt family again.

A peek inside Grand Central Terminal in 1939

From the New York Central Railroad comes this cool cutaway poster into Grand Central Terminal circa 1939, when train travel reigned supreme.

The zodiac ceiling in the main concourse looks beautifully blue. There’s the main waiting room, now called Vanderbilt Hall, as well as a restaurant concourse, plus various lower levels connecting passengers to commuter trains and subways.

What happened to the art gallery on the third floor above the main waiting room?

Grand Central is filled with acorns and oak leaves

Even when you’re rush through Grand Central Terminal, it’s impossible not to glance up and notice its breathtaking treasures, like the beautiful light fixtures, clocks, and painted or tiled ceilings.

But there’s a decorative theme running through the station that’s a little more subtle and easy to miss: acorns and oak leaves.

An acorn tops the iconic brass clock above the information booth.

Marble garlands of oak leaves and acorns decorate the original 1913 water fountains. They’re also on the ceiling, chandeliers, and staircases.

So what’s with all the harvest images?

It’s a Vanderbilt thing. The Vanderbilt heirs financed the construction of the terminal, and the family crest is all about acorns and oaks leaves.

“From a little acorn a mighty oak shall grow,” was Grand Central builder Cornelius Vanderbilt’s motto, according to Christopher Winn’s I Never Knew That About New York.

I’m not sure if any of the Vanderbilt homes that lined Fifth Avenue in the Gilded Age also featured acorns and oaks. Those flourishes may not have gone with the decor in this chateau-style mansion, for example.

But Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport, Rhode Island summer “cottage,” the 70-room palazzo-inspired Breakers, is also decorated with acorns—a symbol of strength and long life.

[Third photo: via newyork.com; fourth photo: via interestingamerica.com]

The WWII servicemen’s hangout at Grand Central

Wartime New York City was a very hospitable place for the thousands of enlisted men (and women) going off to fight in World War II or returning home on furlough.

Take Grand Central Terminal, for example. During the war, the East Balcony was turned into a “Service Men’s Lounge” by the New York Central and New Haven Railroads.

According to the back of this postcard, the lounge was “equipped with ping pong and pool tables, library, piano, easy chairs, lunch counter, etc.”

The lounge was “a meeting room for men of all nations,” wrote John Belle in Grand Central: Gateway to a Million Lives. “On any given day, it was not unusual to see a kilted Highlander at the coffee bar learning from an American soldier how to dunk a doughnut.”

In 1943, Life ran this warning about the lounge to travelers: “Busiest on weekends when thousands travel on furlough. To give them more room on weekend trains, plan trips you must make for mid-week.”

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.

When cows grazed next to Grand Central

They did at least until the 1870s, when this grainy photo was taken—showing a couple of bovines relaxing in a pasture at Lexington Avenue and 45th Street.

That’s a stone’s throw from Grand Central Terminal’s train shed, which was built at Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue) in the 40s, according to New York: An Illustrated History.

“In the distance looms the northern end of the vast iron-and-glass train shed of Grand Central Depot,” the photo caption reads.

That train shed and the adjacent station were replaced by the Beaux-Arts Grand Central Terminal that still stands today.

Here’s more farm animals grazing and chilling in New York.

A 42nd Street skyscraper’s leaf motif

This lovely band of leaflike curves is part of the lower facade of the Chanin Building, a 56-story office tower on Lexington and 42nd Street.

It’s a little bit of Art Deco across from the Beaux-Arts Grand Central Terminal, which was built just a decade and a half earlier but feels like it’s from an entirely different era.

The rats of the Graybar Building

New York City buildings are decorated with images of horses, goats, elephants, birds, even squirrels. But only on the Graybar Building, an office tower next to Grand Central Terminal, will you find rats.

Yep, three cast-metal rats are depicted climbing above the building’s entrance at 420 Lexington Avenue.

So why rats? It’s not clear, but the architects who built the tower in the 1920s seem to be depicting the cone-shaped objects attached to mooring lines of ships that deterred rats from getting on board.

Or maybe it’s some kind of commentary on the rat race of professionals who ply their trades in office buildings like the Graybar every day.