Excavations, 1908 

Construction 1905 

Grand Central Station and Hotel Manhattan, 1900 

Beaux-Arts design incorporates numerous works of art  Image from 1900

One of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions, with 21.6 million visitors in 2018, excluding train and subway passengers  Image from 1920

Aerial view, 1910 

Crowd at Grand Central Station, September 8, 1908 

Grand Central rays of sunlight, 1930 

Sunlight streaming through windows of the main concourse, 1953 August 

Each of the chandeliers in Vanderbilt Hall weigh 2500 lbs. and glow with 132 bulbs surrounded by carved oak leaves 

Opened to the public on February 2, 1913  The terminal's main departure boards are located at the south end of the space; the boards have been replaced numerous times since their initial installation in 1967.

With 750,000 visitors every day, Grand Central Terminal is one of the most-visited destinations in New York City, second only to Times Square.  

A retail and dining destination as well as the home of the MTA Metro-North Railroad and a subway station serving the 4, 5, 6, 7, and S subway lines. 

It contains a variety of stores and food vendors, including upscale restaurants and bars, two food halls, and a grocery marketplace.  The European style marketplace has 13 different local vendors selling everything from seafood and cooking spices to cheese and deli meats to cupcakes and jams

The terminal's Main Concourse is often used as a meeting place, and is especially featured in films and television. 

The four-faced opal clock, sits in the center of the Main Concourse above the Information Booth  One of Grand Central’s main attractions, and is often the meeting place for visitors and locals alike. You know you’re a New Yorker when you’ve told a friend to “meet me at the clock”!

Grand Central Terminal goes by many names, including Grand Central, the Terminal, and GCT.  Just not “Grand Central Station”—that refers to the US Post Office down the street or the subway station below. Woman sitting on luggage in Grand Central Terminal, September 1958

The main concourse windows are over 60 feet tall and 30 feet wide. Before central air conditioning they opened to allow air flow inside the terminal.  Passengers in the main concourse, October 1941

Engineers labored over plans to perfectly slope the ramps between the upper and lower levels. Commuters found the slope caused them to walk at a brisk pace down the ramps and the expression 'I'll be ramping' became popular soon after its 1913 opening.  Passengers in the main concourse, October 1941

The Main Concourse's ceiling is an elliptical barrel vault.   A false ceiling of square boards, installed in 1944, bears an elaborate celestial mural painted with more than 2,500 stars and several bands in gold set against a turquoise backdrop. This ceiling covers the original 1913 version, which had degraded because of water damage.

Original plans called for the ceiling to contain a skylight, but money and time ran out. Instead, a mural was painted directly on the ceiling.   It was conceived in 1912 by architect Warren and painter Paul César Helleu. The latter, who had come to the United States for a three-month stay to create portraits of eight women for a Parisian magazine, sketched a conceptual design for Warren. Helleu worked from a chart given by Columbia astronomy professor Harold Jacoby, who had derived it from the Uranometria, a star atlas published in 1603. The mural was executed in 1913 by James Monroe Hewlett and Charles Basing of Hewlett-Basing Studio. They were assisted in the design by Helle and multiple astronomers, and in the painting by more than 50 painting assistants. Around 63 electric bulbs were installed to amplify the visual impact of the stars. The depicted constellations include those of the winter zodiac viewable from October to March, from Aquarius to Cancer. Also depicted are Pegasus, Triangulum Majus and Minus, Musca Borealis, and Orion, as well as two broad gold bands spanning the ceiling, representing the ecliptic and the equator.

The starry ceiling contains several astronomical inaccuracies. While the stars within some constellations appear correctly as they would from earth, other constellations are reversed left-to-right, as is the overall arrangement of the constellations on the ceiling. 

By the 1980s, the new ceiling was obscured by decades of grime, restored in 1996  The dirt buildup was sometimes reported to be tar and nicotine from tobacco smoke, or diesel or coal soot from the trains in the terminal's train shed (trains have utilized electric power in Manhattan since 1908). Spectroscopic examination revealed that it was made up of air pollutants from trucks, cars, and emissions and contaminants from incinerators and factories. As a general renovation of the terminal got underway, historians and preservationists called for the 1944 boards to be removed and the original ceiling mural restored. But Beyer Blinder Belle, the architecture firm that led the renovation, deemed the original mural irreversibly damaged and noted that the asbestos-laden boards would be hazardous to remove. Starting September 1996, the ceiling boards were cleaned and repainted. Lights were installed into the ceiling boards to imitate the stars, restoring a feature previously only seen from 1913 to 1944. A single dark patch (one brick) if you follow the claw of cancer (the crab) on the ceiling to the corner, was left untouched by renovators to remind visitors of the grime that once covered the ceiling.

The ceiling bears a small dark circle amid the stars above the image of Pisces.  In a 1957 attempt to improve public morale after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, an American Redstone missile was set up in the Main Concourse. With no other way to erect the missile, a hole was cut into the 1944 false ceiling to allow a cable to be lowered to lift the rocket into place. Historical preservation dictated that this hole remains as a reminder of the many uses of the Terminal over the years.

The circulation system allows passengers to enter the Main Concourse, then leave through various passages that branch from it 

Several passages run north of the terminal, which lead to exits at every street from 45th to 48th Street 

Each of the east–west passageways runs through a different building. The northernmost is the Graybar Passage 

Access to the lower-level tracks is provided by the Dining Concourse, located below the Main Concourse and connected to it by numerous stairs, ramps, and escalators.   For decades, it was called the Suburban Concourse because it handled commuter rail trains. Today, it has central seating and lounge areas, surrounded by restaurants and food vendors. The shared public seating in the concourse was designed resembling Pullman traincars. These areas are frequented by the homeless, and as a result, in the mid-2010s the MTA created two areas with private seating for dining customers. The terminal's late-1990s renovation added stands and restaurants to the concourse, and installed escalators to link it to the main concourse level. The MTA also spent $2.2 million to install two circular terrazzo designs by David Rockwell and Beyer Blinder Belle, each 45 feet in diameter, over the concourse's original terrazzo floor. Since 2015, part of the Dining Concourse has been closed for the construction of stairways and escalators to the new LIRR terminal being built as part of East Side Access.

All of the terminal's light fixtures are bare light bulbs.  At the time of the terminal's construction, electricity was still a relatively new invention, and the inclusion of electric light bulbs showcased this innovation.

In 2009, the incandescent light bulbs were replaced with energy- and money-saving fluorescent lamp fixtures. 

Interior view of Grand Central station depot tracks, 1900  Grand Central covers 48 acres (19 ha) and has 44 platforms, more than any other railroad station in the world.

In 1998, the hall was renovated and renamed Vanderbilt Hall after the family that built and owned the station.   It is used for the annual Christmas Market, as well as for special exhibitions and private events.

At morning rush hour, a train arrives at the terminal every 58 seconds  Image taken 1904

Interior, 1900 

Chuting Mail, 1910 

Trucking mail, 1910 

Mechanical carrier for mail, 1910 

Sorting mail 1910 

Mail chute, 1910 

Exterior architectural detail, clock on the main facade  The facade includes several large works of art. At the top of the south facade is a 13-foot-wide clock. The clock is surrounded by the Glory of Commerce sculptural group, a 48-foot-wide sculpture by Jules-Félix Coutan, which includes representations of Minerva, Hercules, and Mercury. At its unveiling in 1914, the work was considered the largest sculptural group in the world

Plaque  "Landmarks of New York Grand Central Terminal completed in 1913 from plans of Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem on site of earlier depot built by Commodore Cornelius Wanderbilt in 1371. Statuary group over main entrance executed by Jules Coutan. Plaque erected 1957 by the New York Community Trust"

Passengers on the main concourse, 1919 

Rotunda of the Revised Grand Central Station 1897  Grand Central Depot
Railroads brought people, profits…and pollution. Residents complained, and in 1854 the city banned soot-belching steam engines below 42nd Street, keeping them far from New York’s populated heart. Trains arriving from the north unhitched their engines at 42nd and towed passenger cars the last few miles downtown by horse. Despite these restrictions, the Hudson, New Haven, and Harlem Railroads were eager to expand. To coordinate their services (and save money) they agreed to share a new transit hub. With 42nd Street the southern limit for steam engines, it was the logical station location. Grand Central Depot opened in 1871. Three towers represented the three participating railroads. Thirty years later, a new Annex doubled the Depot’s size, but double wasn’t enough–rail traffic had already quadrupled.

1913 - Oyster Bar  A banquet was held the night before Grand Central Terminal opened for 100 people invited by the building's architects Warren and Wetmore. The subterranean space is noted for its white tiled Gustavino Vaults. The vaults have an unusual acoustic property in that they amplify sounds as a 'Whispering Gallery'.

1918 - Eastern Standard Time  The early railroads needed to have printed schedules so that people would know when the trains were running. Up to that point, time was told locally. Of course, there were multiple accidents including a major one in August 1853 when two trains collided on the same track killing 14 people because their engineers didn't coordinate their watches. This led to a General Time Convention of Railway companies which in turn led to multiple petitions for Congress to have time zones throughout the US. They were not interested. So, the railroads went ahead and owned their own time zones. So, when Vanderbilt built Grand Central he established Eastern Standard Time and embedded a large clock off of the main waiting room.

1913 - Grand Central Clock  One of the most iconic places within the terminal is the center clock above the information desk. This is the clock which figured in many of the movies set in the Terminal. It is synchronized to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s atomic clock in Bethesda, Maryland. They are accurate to within 1 second every 20 billion years. It is supposedly worth between $10-20 million. It is built of opalescent glass and brass. Not very many people know that there is a hidden staircase beneath the clock allowing the staff who work in the information desk to descend to the lower level where there is another information desk and a break room. It was designed by Henry Edward Bedford, a sculptor and executive of the Self Winding Clock Company which built the clock with assistance from the Seth Thomas Clock Company, which made the movements.