Despite boasting some of the most valuable real estate in New York, Grand Central is a hard area to build on. Join architect Nick Potts for an in-depth walking tour of Grand Central Terminal and its surrounding offices and discover what issues arise when building atop 40 acres of hidden railroad tracks.
270 Park Ave Lobby Render | Courtesy of Foster + Partners
Union Carbide Photos | Ezra Stoller/Esto
Director: Hiatt Woods
Director of Photography: Eric Brouse
Editor: Daniel Finn
Host: Nick Potts
Producer: Skylar Economy
Field Producer: Christie Garcia
Director of Creative Development, Lifestyle: Morgan Crossley
Line Producer: Joe Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon Fuhr
Production Manager: Melissa Heber
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Camera Operator: Marc Manasse
Audio Engineer: Brett Van Deusen
Production Assistant: Caleb Clark; Sonia Butt
Post Production Supervisor: Andrew Montague
Post Production Coordinator: Holly Frew
Supervising Editor: Christina Mankellow
Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
VFX: Sam Fuller
Colorist: Oliver Eid
270 Park Ave Lobby Render | Courtesy of Foster + Partners
Union Carbide Photos | Ezra Stoller/Esto
Director: Hiatt Woods
Director of Photography: Eric Brouse
Editor: Daniel Finn
Host: Nick Potts
Producer: Skylar Economy
Field Producer: Christie Garcia
Director of Creative Development, Lifestyle: Morgan Crossley
Line Producer: Joe Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon Fuhr
Production Manager: Melissa Heber
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Camera Operator: Marc Manasse
Audio Engineer: Brett Van Deusen
Production Assistant: Caleb Clark; Sonia Butt
Post Production Supervisor: Andrew Montague
Post Production Coordinator: Holly Frew
Supervising Editor: Christina Mankellow
Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
VFX: Sam Fuller
Colorist: Oliver Eid
Category
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Grand Central Terminal might look tiny compared to the buildings around it, but what you can
00:04see is nearly 40 acres of underground train tracks covering 10 blocks of prime New York
00:09City real estate.
00:10And this hidden railyard creates serious problems for the tall buildings on top of it, including
00:14one brand new supertall that will change the New York City skyline forever.
00:18I'm Nick Potts, I'm an architect, and today we're doing a walking tour of what's hiding
00:22behind Grand Central Station in New York City.
00:30When Grand Central was initially built in its previous iterations, the trains were just
00:35sitting out in open air, which because we're in the middle of the city, it was a huge problem.
00:39You have this huge parking lot for trains limiting the amount of prime New York City
00:44real estate.
00:45And the solution that they came up with was to actually lower the trains after the railway
00:50was electrified and start developing ways of building on top of it.
00:55The Grand Central Railroad essentially created 10 prime blocks of Manhattan real estate at
01:00the most important intersection in the city.
01:02Part and parcel with the development of Grand Central Terminal was what was called Terminal
01:05City, a real estate development deal behind it in the area that was being vacated by the
01:10trains.
01:11And it took a while for them to really figure out what to do.
01:14And what was seen as a prime development back in the 19-teens and 1920s was hotels and smaller
01:21residential scale properties.
01:24Over time, as the land values increased, it demanded larger buildings.
01:28And the typology also changed to office buildings, where there's a daily in and out of thousands
01:33of people.
01:34And so as the buildings got larger, the need for the buildings to perform in an efficient
01:40way was intensified.
01:42The office building market is very competitive.
01:45And at the top of all office buildings are what are called Class A office buildings,
01:48which are really your prime real estate in great locations that provide almost zero friction
01:54to their building occupants.
01:56Having enough elevators, having enough points of contact where nobody is being held up through
02:00friction or through knots or snags in traffic.
02:04This is New York, and time is money.
02:05If you're a tenant in a building at the most important intersection in the most important
02:09building in the city, sitting for 30 seconds as you're waiting for your elevator is not
02:14going to cut it.
02:15So these buildings need to be fast, they need to be efficient, and they need to work.
02:19And a high-speed elevator requires a pit, which because we're on top of a rail yard,
02:23there's no basement to take these elevator pits.
02:25However, crucially, you also can't have elevator pits for high-speed elevators where there
02:29are active rail yards, because the elevators would be where the trains are.
02:33So this new urban grid that was created is both incredibly valuable, but incredibly tricky
02:39for anyone designing a new building to figure out.
02:43So let's see how some of the other buildings north of Grand Central worked with their constraints
02:46and developed innovative solutions to solve the problem of building on top of a rail yard.
02:58Over my shoulder is the MetLife building, originally built as the Pan Am building in
03:011963 by Emery Roth, Pietro Belushi, and Walter Gropius.
03:06This is really one of the most successful buildings in dealing with its constraints,
03:10partially because it exists within the Grand Central footprint.
03:14It almost feels like it's part of the station.
03:17So as you'll see in a lot of these buildings, the solution to this difficult site was to
03:20completely elevate the lobby into a sky lobby.
03:24You go up escalators and walk around, and you wait on your raised level.
03:29This is still one of the largest office buildings in the city, nearly 2.8 million square feet.
03:34There are tens of thousands of people in this building at any moment, and at the beginning
03:38of the day and the end of the day, you do not want people waiting in elevator lobbies
03:42and being frustrated by having to wait in lines.
03:46This building does have a raised lobby, meaning the elevators aren't accessed directly from
03:50the street.
03:51But because it's inside of Grand Central Terminal, you really don't notice it.
03:54The elevators exist two levels above the floor level of Grand Central, and part of the reason
03:59you don't notice that, the escalators that take you into the lobby of the MetLife building
04:03are accessed directly from the front course of Grand Central with the blue ceiling and
04:08the Apple Store.
04:09It is directly connected.
04:11Like any transportation building, like an airport, like a train station, you're used
04:15to being on escalators and stairs, so you barely recognize the vertical move you're
04:19making.
04:20And in a way, it's almost like having the famous concourse of Grand Central Station
04:24as the lobby of your building.
04:26It also has the viaduct that you can see behind me, which is its primary means of getting
04:30vehicles into the building.
04:32There's a 400-car parking garage that's accessed directly from this roadway.
04:36There's also a black car entrance for VIPs.
04:39Interestingly, this also had a heliport on the top of the building that was used briefly
04:44and finally shut down in 1977 after a tragic accident.
04:48With the opening of a helicopter landing pad atop a midtown skyscraper, even blase New
04:53Yorkers were turning their eyes skyward as the choppers went through test runs before
04:58the official opening.
05:01This building really does take advantage of the original design for Grand Central, which
05:06already decoupled the train traffic from the level of the street.
05:09And it continues this kind of theme of untying or decoupling circulation from competing systems
05:16in order to relieve congestion.
05:23Behind me is the Helmsley Building.
05:24This was built as the Grand Central Building for the Grand Central Railroad.
05:28This is interesting for many reasons.
05:31One is that it was the centerpiece of the Terminal City development.
05:34One of the others is that it's one of very few terminal buildings, or axial buildings,
05:39we have in New York City.
05:40Because New York City is built on a grid, there are very few opportunities for a building
05:45to be at the end of a street.
05:47And the Grand Central Railroad and its architects, Warren Wetmore, really took advantage of this.
05:51They built a very monumental tower, capped with a very ornamented crown.
05:55It was built in 1926.
05:58This is before central air conditioning.
06:01This was before the advent of fluorescent light.
06:04And so the floorplates are quite small.
06:06And you compare that with Pan Am, where the floorplates are 55,000 square feet.
06:10The floorplates in the tower of the Grand Central Building were about 15,000 square feet.
06:15Not exactly ideal for today's office environments, where you need a huge amount of contiguous
06:19floor space.
06:20And so a building like this just doesn't perform to the same level that any of the new Class
06:24A office buildings, or frankly even Pan Am, deliver.
06:27Of the office buildings in Terminal City, the Helmsley Building is really the only one
06:31that has its elevator lobbies directly at street level.
06:34And the way they did this is by creating these micro-elevator lobbies, essentially
06:39in the space of the platform between the tracks.
06:41And you can actually read how it negotiates its relationship with the railroad below.
06:46You can see, in the openings of the viaduct and also the lobby, how it's aligning itself
06:53with the train tracks below it.
06:55Essentially the open areas are where the trains are, the closed areas are where the platforms
06:59are and where columns can be.
07:00The elevators here, because of the narrowness of the platform, you're dealing with about
07:0420 feet max, it's these very odd kind of two-car elevator banks.
07:10Totally not efficient.
07:11There hadn't been a lot of tall office buildings built in 1926, so they're starting to push
07:15towards the efficiency in the world we live in now, but it still is very much not a building
07:21of today.
07:22And even though the Helmsley Building isn't the most efficient, because it has this iconic
07:25role at the center of Terminal City, it was rather quickly landmarked, and that's why
07:30it still is here.
07:31It's in good company as a building that is well-known, but is possibly not performing
07:36at the level of a Class A office building.
07:38You think about the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Woolworth Building.
07:42These are buildings that, similarly, were groundbreaking icons of the city, but they
07:48just simply don't perform on the level of the newer, more efficient, more optimized
07:53office buildings.
07:54Over my shoulder and under construction is 270 Park Avenue.
08:02This is actually the third building to occupy the site since Terminal City was developed
08:06less than 100 years ago.
08:07So you can imagine there is this constant need to remake and to make these buildings
08:13more efficient.
08:14A very interesting thing to note about this is that the building that existed in its site
08:17was already an important building in its own right.
08:20So the previous occupant of this site was the Union Carbide Building, designed by Skidmore,
08:24Owings, and Merrill, with Nathalie Blois, yes, a female architect, working in the 1950s
08:29as its lead designer.
08:30Why would the owner redevelop a building that had such an important role in architectural
08:34history?
08:35It really comes down to efficiency.
08:36The original building had 24 elevators and about a million square feet.
08:40The new building is not a huge amount larger.
08:42It's been projected it's about 1.3 and 1.5 million square feet.
08:46But it likely has nearly 50 elevators, given that amount of square footage.
08:50So it's less about creating a much bigger building and doubling or tripling the size
08:54of the building.
08:55It's more about being more efficient.
08:57With super high technology, super high speed elevators, and frankly just better metrics,
09:04is the reason why you do something so huge, so ambitious, at the cost of something that
09:09already had a huge amount of embedded value in it, namely a completed building.
09:13There's a sea change in how the lobby of the original Union Carbide Building and this one,
09:19and you have to think about the lobby and the entire lobby experience.
09:22The Union Carbide Building's solution to this difficult site was to completely elevate the
09:26lobby into a sky lobby, one level above, which was presented almost as a gallery.
09:31The philosophy of the old building was to celebrate the sky lobby.
09:34It was this iconic, top-lit, gallery-like space that everyone entering the building
09:40had to go up escalators and walk around, and you wait on your raised level.
09:45The new building has, obviously, many more elevators, and the imagery that has been presented
09:51of the building suggests that they're opting for something much more subtle, much more
09:55ramped, much more cascading, as a way of minimizing the fact that you're moving up a floor.
10:01What do you think the best solution is?
10:02Let us know in the comments.
10:04And for more stories like this, be sure to check out our other episodes of Walking Tour.