Content area
Full Text
It's a gantlet to run on the way to work, a trysting spot for lovers, a familiar movie set, a refuge for the homeless, a labyrinth to out-of-towners and a relic of railroading's golden age.
Grand Central Terminal is also an American cliche, as in "busy as Grand Central Station"-even if the cliche doesn't quite get the name right.
Inside its marble and terra cotta walls you can get your shoes shined, buy a London newspaper, have a passport photo taken, fill a prescription, mail a letter, bet on a horse, buy a tie, copy a resume, sell some stock, rent a car, get a haircut, savor oyster stew, and-for a dollar a minute-play tennis on one of two courts tucked into the rafters.
Each weekday, more than half a million people pass through its oak and bronze portals. With 500 daily trains, there's an arrival or departure on the average of every three minutes. Thousands traverse the concourse as a cross-town shortcut, to descend to the city's busiest subway station, or merely to get out of the weather.
Some come to gawk at what many call the New York's most beautiful interior space and to gaze at its celestial mural 125 feet above. Amateur astronomers will notice that the golden zodiac is reversed. Several theories have been offered, the most likely being that the painters simply flipped the sketch during execution.
The present terminal was conceived at the turn of the century when travel and trains were synonymous. It was completed in 1913 at the 42nd Street site of the old cupolaed Grand Central Depot, with its vast iron...