The Real Secrets of Grand Central Terminal
The Whispering Gallery
Jack meets Euri at the whispering gallery. It’s a real place. Here's a photo of me (taken by Todd Plitt to accompany a USA Today story about The Night Tourist) at one of the columns.
Just as the guide in The Night Tourist explains, if you stand on one side of it and whisper into a column, a person standing on the other side can hear. If you’re ever in Grand Central, give it a try. You never know who might answer.
Other whispering galleries if you want to give one a try closer to home? Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol and the rotundas of the Texas and Missouri State Capitols.
The Ceiling of Stars
Jack is mesmerized by the ceiling of the main concourse of the terminal, which is decorated with an enormous mural of the night sky.
As the guide in The Night Tourist notes, the constellations are backwards. The reason why is that the French painter who designed the mural took his inspiration from medieval manuscripts, which tended to show the heavens as God would have seen them looking down upon the earth, rather than as man sees them looking up.
The result is that the ceiling makes every single one of us seem special. If you ever travel through Grand Central Terminal, you can imagine yourself not as one of a million ordinary travelers but as a unique and godly being.
Track 61
One of the greatest secrets of Grand Central Terminal is Track 61. As Euri explains to Jack, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s train stopped on this secret track and his car drove onto an elevator that took him up beneath the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and to the street. He was able to slip into the city unnoticed. The track, platform and elevator all exist.
Why would a president want to do this? Not for the reasons you might think. FDR wasn’t worried about his personal security or trying to attend secret meetings. Rather, he didn’t want anyone to see him get off the train and into his car because he had a disability—paralysis in his legs from polio. He didn’t want the American people to see this sign of weakness, particularly during the trying years of the Depression and the Second World War. Read more about FDR’s use of the track and how to find it—or at least get close to it—here.
There are, however, some underground experts who dispute that FDR ever used the track and claim the story is just an urban myth. One of the most interesting is Joseph Brennan, who runs a great site on abandoned underground platforms and tracks in New York. See a historical photo of the Waldorf Astoria platform and read his comprehensive account of Track 61.