Why NYC’s Grand Central is So Hard to Build Around

Grand Central Terminal might look tiny

compared to the buildings around it,

but what you can't see is nearly 40 acres

of underground train tracks

covering 10 blocks of prime New York City real estate.

And this hidden rail yard creates serious problems

for the tall buildings on top of it,

including one brand new super tall

that will change the New York City skyline forever.

I'm Nick Potts.

I'm an architect, and today we're doing a walking tour

of what's hiding behind Grand Central Station

in New York City.

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When Grand Central was initially built

in its previous iterations,

the trains were just sitting out in open air,

which because we're in the middle of the city,

it was a huge problem.

You have this huge parking lot for trains

limiting the amount of prime New York City real estate.

And the solution that they came up with

was to actually lower the trains,

after the railway was electrified,

and start developing ways of building on top of it.

The Grand Central Railroad essentially created

10 prime blocks of Manhattan real estate

at the most important intersection in the city.

Part and parcel with the development

of Grand Central Terminal was what was called Terminal City,

a real estate development deal behind it

in the area that was being vacated by the trains.

And it took a while for them to really figure out what to do

and what was seen as a prime development

back in the 1910s and 1920s

was hotels and smaller residential scale properties.

Over time, as the land values increased,

it demanded larger buildings,

and the typology also changed to office buildings

where there's a daily in and out of thousands of people.

And so as the buildings got larger,

the need for the buildings to perform

in an efficient way was intensified.

And the office building market is very competitive.

And at the top of all office buildings

are what are called Class A office buildings,

which are really your prime real estate in great locations

that provide almost zero friction

to their building occupants,

having enough elevators, having enough points of contact

where nobody is being held up through friction,

or through knots or snags in traffic.

This is New York and time is money.

If you're a tenant in a building

at the most important intersection,

in the most important building in the city,

sitting for 30 seconds as you're waiting for your elevator

is not going to cut it.

So these buildings need to be fast,

they need to be efficient, and they need to work.

And a high speed elevator requires a pit,

which because we're on top of a rail yard,

there's no basement to take these elevator pits.

However, crucially, you also can't have elevator pits

for high speed elevators

where there are active rail yards,

because the elevators would be where the trains are.

So this new urban grid that was created

is both incredibly valuable,

but incredibly tricky for anyone designing a new building

to figure out.

So let's see how some of the other buildings

north of Grand Central

worked with their constraints,

and developed innovative solutions to solve

the problem of building on top of a rail yard.

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Over my shoulder is the MetLife building,

originally built is the Pan Am building in 1963

by Emery Roth, Pietro Belluschi, and Walter Gropius.

This is really one of the most successful buildings

in dealing with its constraints,

partially because it exists

within the Grand Central footprint.

It almost feels like it's part of the station.

So as you'll see in a lot of these buildings,

the solution to this difficult site

was to completely elevate the lobby into a sky lobby.

You go up escalators and walk around,

and you wait on your raised level.

This is still one of the largest office buildings

in the city, nearly 2.8 million square feet.

There are tens of thousands of people in this building

at any moment,

and at the beginning of the day and the end of the day,

you do not want people waiting in elevator lobbies,

and being frustrated by having to wait in lines.

This building does have a raised lobby,

meaning the elevators aren't accessed

directly from the street,

but because it's inside of Grand Central Terminal,

you really don't notice it.

The elevators exist two levels

above the floor level of Grand Central,

and part of the reason you don't notice that

the escalators that take you into the lobby

of the MetLife building,

are accessed directly from the front course of Grand Central

with the Blue Ceiling and the Apple Store.

It is directly connected.

Like any transportation building,

like an airport, like a train station,

you're used to being on escalators and stairs,

so you barely recognize the vertical move you're making.

And in a way, it's almost like having

the famous concourse of Grand Central Station

as the lobby of your building.

It also has the viaduct that you can see behind me,

which is its primary means of getting vehicles

into the building.

There's a 400 car parking garage

that's accessed directly from this roadway.

There's also a black car entrance for VIPs.

Interestingly, this also had a heliport

on the top of the building

that was used briefly and finally shut down in 1977,

after a tragic accident.

[Narrator] With the opening of a helicopter landing pad

atop a Midtown skyscraper,

even blase New Yorkers were turning their eyes skyward

as the choppers went through test runs

before the official opening.

[fun music]

This building really does take advantage

of the original design for Grand Central,

which already decoupled the train traffic

from the level of the street.

And it continues this kind of theme of untying

or decoupling circulation

from competing systems in order to relieve congestion.

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Behind me is the Helmsley Building.

This was built as the Grand Central building

for the Grand Central Railroad.

This is interesting for many reasons.

One is that it was the centerpiece

of the Terminal City development.

One of the others is that

it's one of very few terminal buildings,

or axial buildings that we have in New York City.

'Cause New York City is built on a grid,

there are very few opportunities for a building

to be at the end of a street.

And the Grand Central Railroad and its architects,

Warren Wetmore, really took advantage of this.

They built a very monumental tower,

capped with a very ornamented crown.

It was built in 1926.

This is before secular air conditioning.

This was before the advent of fluorescent light.

And so the floor plates are quite small.

And you compare that with Pan Am,

where the floor plates are 55,000 square feet.

The floor plates in the tower of the Grand Central Building,

were about 15,000 square feet.

Not exactly ideal for today's office environments,

where you need a huge amount of contiguous floor space.

And so a building like this just doesn't perform

to the same level

that any of the new Class A office buildings,

or frankly even Pan Am deliver.

Of the office buildings in Terminal City,

the Helmsley building is really the only one

that has its elevator lobbies directly at street level.

And the way they did this

is by creating these micro elevator lobbies,

essentially in the space of the platform between the tracks.

And you can actually read how it negotiates

its relationship with the railroad below.

And you can see in the openings of the viaduct

and also the lobby,

how it's aligning itself with the train tracks below it.

Essentially, the open areas are where the trains are,

the closed areas are where the platforms are,

and where columns can be.

The elevators here,

because of the narrowness of the platform

you're dealing with about 20 feet max.

It's these very odd kind of two car elevator banks.

Totally not efficient.

There hadn't been a lot of tall office buildings

built in 1926.

So they're starting to push towards

the efficiency in the world we live in now,

but it still is very much not a building of today.

And even though the Helmsley building

isn't the most efficient,

because it has this iconic role

at the center of Terminal City,

it was rather quickly landmarked,

and that's why it still is here.

It's in good company, is a building that is well known

but is possibly not performing at the level

of a Class A office building.

You think about the Empire State Building,

the Chrysler Building, the Woolworth Building,

these are buildings that similarly

were groundbreaking icons of the city,

but they just simply don't perform

on the level of the newer, more efficient,

more optimized office buildings.

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Over my shoulder and under construction

is 270 Park Avenue.

This is actually the third building to occupy the site

since Terminal City was developed

less than a hundred years ago.

So you can imagine

there's this constant need to remake,

and to make these buildings more efficient.

A very interesting thing to note about this

is that the building that existed in its site

was already an important building in its own right.

So the previous occupant of this site

was the Union Carbide Building,

designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,

with Natalie De Blois,

yes, a female architect, working in the 1950s

as its lead designer.

Why would the owner redevelop a building

that had such an important role in architectural history?

It really comes down to efficiency.

The original building had 24 elevators,

and about a million square feet.

The new building is not a huge amount larger.

It's been projected,

it's about 1.3 and 1.5 million square feet,

but it likely has nearly 50 elevators

given that amount of square footage.

So it's less about creating a much bigger building,

and doubling or tripling the size of the building,

it's more about being more efficient

with super high technology,

super high speed elevators,

and frankly, just better metrics

is the reason why you do something so huge, so ambitious

at the cost of something that already

had a huge amount of embedded value in it,

namely a completed building.

There's a sea change in how the lobby

of the original Union Carbide Building and this one,

think about the lobby and the entire lobby experience.

The Union Carbide Building solution

to this difficult site

was to completely elevate the lobby into a sky lobby,

one level above, which was presented almost as a gallery.

The philosophy of the old building

was to celebrate the sky lobby.

It was this iconic top lit gallery like space

that everyone entering the building had to go up escalators

and walk around, and you wait on your raised level.

The new building has obviously many more elevators,

and the imagery that has been presented to the building

suggests that they're opting for something much more subtle,

much more ramped, much more cascading

as a way of minimizing the fact

that you're moving up a floor.

And what do you think the best solution is?

Let us know in the comments.

And for more stories like this,

be sure to check out our other episodes of Walking Tour.

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