Right in front of you is Grand Central Terminal, but we are actually here to talk about a phantom building. A massive skyscraper that was almost dropped squarely on top of this magnificent structure. They called it Grand Central Tower.
Back in the nineteen fifties, train travel was tanking. People were buying cars and discovering the joy of jet planes. The New York Central Railroad was bleeding money. So, they looked up at the empty sky above the station and saw dollar signs. Due to local zoning laws, they had a ton of unused air rights, which is basically the legal permission to build vertically into the empty space above a property.
In nineteen fifty-four, they considered a plan by architect I-M Pei for an eighty-story, sixteen-hundred-foot tower that would have been the tallest in the world. He later tweaked it into a hyperboloid, a massive hourglass-shaped tower reinforced with a lattice of diagonal beams that was supposedly sturdy enough to survive a nuclear bomb. Thankfully, that idea fizzled out, and they built the Pan Am building just to the north instead.
But the railroad was still broke. In nineteen sixty-eight, a developer leased the air rights for three million dollars a year, which is roughly twenty-six million dollars today. They hired famed architect Marcel Breuer to design a towering monolith.
Take a glance at your phone to see a rendering of Breuer's first proposal. He designed a nine-hundred-fifty-foot stone-clad tower that would have been cantilevered over the main concourse. Cantilevered just means the upper floors jutted outward into midair, supported entirely by a central core rather than columns directly underneath them. It looked like a giant concrete anvil resting right on top of the station. Constructing the lobby alone would have destroyed the terminal's historic waiting room.
New Yorkers absolutely hated it. Critics called it a grotesquerie. Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis fiercely opposed the project, arguing it was cruel to strip the city of its architectural heritage. The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, or L-P-C for short, rejected it, calling the design an esthetic joke.
Breuer tried again in nineteen sixty-nine. If you check your screen one more time, you can see his second concept. This time, his fifty-nine-story building would have demolished the entire terminal facade, saving only the indoor concourse. The L-P-C shot that down too. The railroad sued the city, sparking a bitter legal war that dragged on for nearly a decade.
Finally, in nineteen seventy-eight, the U-S Supreme Court ruled in favor of New York City. The landmark law was upheld, preventing the tower's construction and saving the terminal from being swallowed whole by a corporate skyscraper.
Because of that massive fight, Grand Central stands today without a concrete giant sitting on its shoulders. Take your time admiring the unobstructed view of this beautiful survivor. Whenever you are ready to keep moving, our next stop awaits.
