Grand Central’s regal Vanderbilt Hall, she of the “faux Caen stone walls, the Tennessee Pink Marble floors, the white Bottocino marble wainscoting,” according to Metro-North, will close tomorrow for seven months as it undergoes a thorough scrubbing.

(Vanderbilt Hall is the big square room you see when you enter GCT from 42nd; depending on the time of year, it may be hosting a squash tournament, a Christmas fair, or giant Scots tossing logs for Tartan Week.)

“Metro-North is committed to the good stewardship of one of New York City’s most revered buildings.  It is a responsibility Metro-North does not take lightly and we will not allow Grand Central to slip into the disrepair of the past,” said Metro-North President Peter Cannito of the $3.6 million job. 

Commuters’ routines should not be affected over the course of the next seven months. According to Metro-North, “a painted, fireproofed plywood tunnel will be built across the room from the doors on 42^nd Street” to the Main Concourse.

From Bottocino marble wainscoting to painted plywood. Ouch.

And you think the downtown 6 is slow.

Back in, oh, 1858, trains going south of 42nd Street were decoupled and then hooked up to horses–yes, horses–to take them to a terminal at 26th Street.

Source: Grand Central Terminal: Gateway to New York, by Ed Stanley

Here’s a hysterical YouTube video where 207 people simply freeze in place in the middle of Grand Central for several minutes. One guy is in the process of tying his shoe, another is drinking a bottle of water, another is scooping up some papers he’s dropped, when all of them simply stop moving, much to the curiosity/delight of the others in Grand Central. (The freezers are obviously trained in this stuff.)

The best part is the mustachioed garbage cart driver who’s unamused as he’s stuck behind a frozen body or two. “I can’t move my cahwt,” he tells the walkie talkie in the finest Queens English spoken since Joey Ramone passed.

Thanks to Derailed for digging it up.

Finally got around to checking out the Grand Central documentary on PBS from the other night. It’s terrific, offering a painstakingly detailed look at the railroad’s transformation from steam to electric, Grand Central’s rivalry with that Joisey-accented west side upstart, Penn Station, and the sad tale of William Wilgus, the civil engineer who designed the transit system we know and love today.

There’s no shortage of tragedy in the tale, including the horrific crash of 1902, as the White Plains express blew through red lights and horns and hammered an idling train from New Rochelle in the Grand Central tunnel, killing 15. Photos of the old New Rochelle train station, looking something like a country farmhouse, are pretty cool.

Not long after the system was switched to electric–1907 or so–a train headed for White Plains jumped the track at Woodlawn, killing 20.

The doc also explains Wilgus’s concept of “taking wealth from the air” and selling the air rights above Grand Central to finance the project, the first documented case of selling air rights.

Sadly, Wilgus gets thrown under the bus by railroad brass after the Woodlawn incident. He was deemed “culpably negligent” because the crippling weight of the train’s engines caused the rails to widen; later designs better distributed the weight.

A variety of talking heads, from architects to historians to the esteemed writer Susan Eddy, who happens to be the Missus’s old boss, offer intriguing perspective. But I couldn’t help but wonder–how did they not have our own Engine Bob sharing Grand Central stuff that no one else knows?

Greeting Grand Central commuters as they entered the stairs heading down to the subways today was a glaring ad campaign from CareerBuilder.com. “BE GRUNTLED,” bellowed one ad that took up an entire wall across from the stairs, while another section above the staircase implored us all to “STOP WHINING” and find another job–preferably through CareerBuilder.com.

I don’t recall ever seeing another ad campaign in that spot.  

I don’t know if we, the Grand Central commuters, should be flattered or insulted. What exactly prompted CareerBuilder to target us with a very expensive ad campaign? What makes us such a desirable target audience? Is it that we’re so obviously disgusted with our jobs as we embark on our daily mummy waltz from train to train? Or is it that we of the hefty Westchester/Fairfield mortgages are an A-1 demographic, with high-paying, influential jobs…or simply jobs period?

I wonder. And for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t mind being a bit more gruntled, come to think of it.

Hey, don’t forget, PBS has what promises to be an intriguing documentary on Grand Central on tonight.

“‘Grand Central’ tells its tale of business and the city briskly via the familiar, and in this case entertaining, mix of archival photos and congenial talking heads,” reports the NY Times. “The film’s other component, which could be called the nostalgic-poetic as opposed to the historical-dramatic, is not as felicitous.

As I mentioned the other day, a metal barricade was placed between those going into Grand Central from below and those descending from Grand Central into the subways.

The barricade was there Monday, gone yesterday, and gone again today. Coincidentally, I noticed that yesterday and today featured the worst buildup of foot traffic at the top of the escalators that I’d seen in the past year; a bottleneck heading down, and one almost as bad heading up.

Turns out, one of the escalators that brings people up to Grand Central from the 4, 5, 6 and 7 trains was out of commission. It was a good two-minute wait to get onto the down staircase–which at the time feels like, oh, an hour or so.

Not sure the barricade would’ve actually helped, or if commuters would’ve simply gotten crushed against it like some sort of overpacked soccer stadium disaster. Hopefully the elevator’s up and running tomorrow.

Filthy Mark is a friend from high school, given the nickname thanks to his formerly Falstaffian appetite for certain vices. When Filthy Mark joined the NYPD about a decade ago, the moniker was tweaked to Filthy Narc. That made us laugh, but didn’t ultimately catch on.

Filthy Mark and I have been playing phone tag, for lack of a better term, for several days, trying to get our families together (he lives in Copland up in Putnam Co.). He was on my mind as I hustled to the 5:27 last night. As I stepped onto the platform with about a minute to spare, a cop jumped in front of me. He looked for all the world like Filthy Mark.

I had my iPod cranking, was focused on getting my ass onto the train, and wasn’t quite thinking clearly.

“Excuse me, sir, I’ll need to check your bag,” he said.

Was Filthy Mark f***ing with me, I thought for a split second. Upon further inspection, it was not, in fact, Mark. It was a cop named Prieto, and he needed to search my bag.

Had I been put on a watch list for disparaging Metro-North on this blog, for listening for a little too much revolutionary music like the Clash’s first album, for attending that lone Amnesty International meeting in college (it was just to impress a girl! i swear!)? More pressing, the Missus and Little G were counting on me to be on that 5:27 so we could check out that great Jack O’Lantern blaze up in Croton. If I miss the train, we miss the pumpkin blaze, and I’m sleeping in the minivan.

“It’ll just take a minute,” said Fake Filthy Mark with what actually might be classified as a smile.

I told him I’d confused him for a second with a friend from high school as another cop–a dark, giant fellow who, making things even more confusing, looked like another cop friend (McDowell) from high school–slid a white ticket the size of a stamp into a machine.

“That’s it, you’re done,” said Fake Filthy Mark.

The whole thing took 40 seconds. I made the 5:27 with half a minute to spare.

I’d mentioned before the logjam at the top of the stairs heading from Grand Central down to the subways. Well, the city has done something about it.

This morning, for the first time, commuters were greeted with the steel barricades more commonly seen at Puerto Rican Day parades and, going back a bit, Yankee World Series parades.

The need for a barricade stems from the fact that, at least at 9 a.m. on a weekday, way more people are streaming down the stairs than coming up them. So instead of there naturally being two lanes for up and two for down, the extra bodies heading down often take up the third lane on the stairs, leaving just one lane for those heading up.

Which is usually not a problem, though about once a week, I see a mass of frustrated commuters waiting to climb the stairs as some ninny traipses down them. (In sporting terms, the ninny is “offsides,” and should be sent to a penalty box. Perhaps the ticket booths that aren’t really needed anymore could double as a penalty box?)

The new barricades separate those heading up and those heading down. The weird thing was, the portable cattle pens stopped just short of the stairs, meaning one could easily slide one’s frame through the gap and hop down the up stairs. Only today, a beefy member of New York’s Finest blocked the gap.

We’ll see what the city has planned for tomorrow.

I got this emphatic answer to my question about the mysterious tennis court in Grand Central. Apparently, this appeared on yelp.com.

Recently, I had a unique experience at Grand Central that I will never forget. My friend and I were riding the elevator up to the Campbell Apartment and he was telling me that it’s a little known fact that there are tennis courts inside the terminal. I LOVE fun facts like this, and imagining what other hidden treasures there are inside this amazing structure.

As he was telling me this, the man riding up in the elevator with us said, “Yes, it’s true”, at which point we realized that there was someone there (taking off our New York blinders that block out anyone within eye contact range). Then he said, to my open-mouthed joy, “Would you like to see it?”

Turns out, we were in the company of the manager of the Tennis Club of Grand Central. It’s a private club now owned by Donald Trump, and plays host to some of the top seeded players of the US Open. This is not a club for your average Joe - fees are up to $170 for an hour of court time. Amazing considering that Trump found it laying dormant in the 80’s - laying dormant!!

Oh it makes me want to explore and explore, late at night with a flashlight. Anyway, the the space has even more history, as prior to the 1960’s it was used as the original set for CBS News, and was also where they filmed the first episode of the Honeymooners. To stand where Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite used to broadcast live was quite a treat, indeed. 

It’s written by a San Fran lady named Liz S. If she and Engine Bob were to go out for coffee, I think we’d pay for it.