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Re: (rshsdepot) Grand Central Terminal - New York, NY

The Kodak slide was historic, it as the largest slide in the world, I think
they printed the thing whole, though I am probably wrong....

I myself am waiting for them to rip out that hideous building at the north
end....

In Long Island City is the Pepsi sign with no Pepsi company, in Jersey City
the Colgate sign on the ground.

I agree slightly with the ideas in this article....I thought it was wrong
when they took out the big Central New  jersey signs and the ferry terminal
when doing up Liberty State Park in Communipaw...so I guess it is one's
taste,,,commerce eventually cluttered up GCT, I am not sure the big clock
was superior to the enhanced original interesting space there now...I
personally think they should put back the old departure boards myself,,, Or
the old NY Central signs that were still in the waiting room in the 70s...

There were never any true Interurbans in GCT...

I would trade getting intercity high speed trains in GCT for allowing
bringing back all that advertising brash stuff!

For an example of what I think is ridiculous combination of old and new see
the Brooklyn Museum of art where in the deco days they chopped out the grand
stairs entrance and put deco elements on the new ground floor
entrance....that is now considered bad looking, so a new first floor
entrance is being built, a post-modern glass mess that fits the classic
architecture of the building not at all...I realize some love these
additions to Smithsonian and The Louvre

As to the idea of nostalgia....most of the architecture in "those olden
days" was nostalgia...Penn Station, Dearborn Station (or should I call it
Polk?), the gone side of Chicago Union Station, all the Greek and Roman
revival art, many Richardson post offices, most McKim, Mead and White....the
campanile at Cal-Berkeley, it was all reflective and copies of buildings in
Italy, what was supposed and interpolated from the ruins of the ancient
world of Rome and Greece...Stanford was a play on the Mission style, it is a
little bit silly to complain about nostalgic restorations when the
structures were glorified examples of nostalgia themselves..this is why the
glass boxes of Johnson and others, the Seagram Building, the UN, and yes,
the Pan Am, too, were hailed as wonderful, because they were truly not
nostalgic, not nostalgic for old styles, not nostalgic for making a steel
girdered building look like it needed masonry and flying buttresses, arches
and all that...the Dakota Hotel needed that stuff, the Waldorf-Astoria
didn't....and I do have a weakness for those modern hotels with the Flash
Gordon elevators and waterfalls inside...




- -----Original Message-----
From: Bernie Wagenblast <brwagenblast_@_comcast.net>
To: RSHS Depot <rshsdepot_@_lists.railfan.net>
Date: Friday, March 08, 2002 3:51 PM
Subject: (rshsdepot) Grand Central Terminal - New York, NY


Link to original article with accompanying photos:
http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0302/cen/index.html

Time Will Tell

Metropolis Magazine

Just back from a quick tour of London's train stations, the authors discover
that the renovators of Grand Central Terminal tried to turn back the clock
and lost their sense of time.

By Marty Kapell and Lyle Rexer
March 2002

Most of us never even thought we liked the clock. It was imposing, gauche,
insistent. But no doubt about it, now that it's gone, we miss the clock. The
timepiece at issue is the oversize Westclox "Big Ben" that was hung
prominently as advertising in Grand Central Terminal for decades. It was
wedged between two of the station's massive columns and formed a portal
between the main waiting room, now called Vanderbilt Hall, and the station's
main concourse. Viewed through the eyes of contemporary preservationists,
the clock was worse than crass--it was completely inappropriate.

But it has become abundantly clear that the clock belongs to that class of
things, like the Studebaker Avanti and the Princess phone, whose true
significance is known only once it is gone--whose absence is far more
significant than its presence ever was. "Architecture is dream and
function," Roland Barthes wrote. And what we miss is the residue of dream,
the evidence of yesterday's utopia.

It certainly seems ungrateful at this late date to quibble with a renovation
that has restored the architectural glory to one of New York's most precious
landmarks. The light through the windows, the bridge from Vanderbilt Hall,
and the main concourse with its magnificent vistas--the scale and
cleanliness of it all--are statements of reverence and optimism for the
city.
The quibble isn't with Grand Central per se but rather with an attitude
toward preservation that leaves no room for the clock or any other anomaly.
That mind-set banishes the possibility that disparate (read:
tasteless/inappropriate/accu-mulated) elements can actually enrich the
experience of a public place. In a recent conversation, Fred
Bland--principal of Beyer Blinder Belle, the architectural firm responsible
for Grand Central's resurrection--remarked that all that was really done to
the station was to "clean it up." Although far more than that was done to
improve the building, Grand Central has been purged of its diversity and
rendered pure. It is now uniformly tasteful and consistent--in fact, a
triumph of good taste. It is so consistent that even its goodness is
inconsequential for the lack of any variation.

The quote often attributed to Louis Kahn that architecture must have
ordinary spaces in order to have good ones, is about the language of
architecture--and indeed all language. Meaning arises from a play of
differences. Qualities like grandeur and offensiveness are relational; they
need each other to be perceived. Grand Central certainly has a variety of
contrasting spaces, ranging from its ordinary low-ceilinged passages to its
glorious main concourse and waiting rooms, all deliberately orchestrated in
a dramatic procession. In their restored state, however, the main concourse
and its tributary spaces display a relentless sameness of style that is
usually achievable--and desirable--only in a new building. This sameness
reduces the significance of the spaces. Of course, Grand Central Terminal is
not a new building. It was built in the age of steam and now functions in
the digital age. And this is the other aspect of difference that makes a
building meaningful--dissonances of time. Architecture needs its yesterdays
as well as its todays. Grand Central gave us more: the pathos of todays that
had become yesterdays.
The crass "Big Ben" contributed to the play of differences in scale, style,
and period that endowed Grand Central with its wealth of meanings. The
actual Big Ben alarm clock was designed by Henry Dreyfuss in 1939. Perhaps
not coincidentally, Dreyfuss was also the designer of choice for the New
York Central Railroad, the terminal's owner and builder. He designed the
elegant 20th-Century Limited and the streamlined 1938 Hudson locomotives.

The clock was a clever advertising choice and probably had more symbolic
significance than was intended. The Big Ben alarm clock was itself a
surprisingly popular item, and doubtless many thousands of commuters dashing
past the giant timepiece every day had been awakened by the bedside version
that morning. The out-scaled clock and its supporting columns formed a
triumphal arch of commutation. The small and large versions together
registered the prospects for making it to the office or back home on time.
These clocks bracketed the vision--pre- and postwar--of a suburban utopia,
where the mass man of Grand Central could become the individual man, with a
human-scale clock all his own.

Although the clock manages to provoke nostalgia, surely nobody would lament
the disappearance of the hulking Kodak sign, which for years dominated the
main concourse from the then- inaccessible east mezzanine. With its flanking
pavilions, it blocked the glorious east windows and upset the station's
symmetry. Yet its absence also leaves a void. The glowing billboard's
designers understood the power of scale, and the backlit images contributed
to the real complexity of the station. The sign brought color into the
monochromatic, sepia-toned, increasingly soot-encrusted station. It also
served as a counterpoint to the anachronism that the station, with its
interurban trains, was quickly becoming. Images of trains traveling through
mountain passes, by the ocean, looked modern and exciting even as rail
travel was already being superseded by the contextless futurism of mass
airline travel.

Elsewhere in the world less proscriptive attitudes inform the renovation of
historically significant structures. In England, with its incredible
inventory of nineteenth-century train sheds, a much more liberal view of
"appropriateness" governs the reuse of its architectural legacy. It seems as
though so few buildings of historical significance have survived in New
York, and our experience in renovating them has been until recently so
disastrous, that we are afraid to engage them in any substantive way. Our
so-called architectural respect is really timid deference: Better to be safe
than sorry. Better a theme park of rail travel than a contemporary assertion
that is certain to offend someone.

In contrast, London's Waterloo, Paddington, and Liverpool Street stations
have recently received substantial bold renovations. The historical elements
of these inspiring buildings have been painstakingly restored, and the new
elements have been rendered in an unapologetically contemporary
architectural vocabulary. This approach actually enriches the historic
fabric of the original buildings. The old is old, the new is new, and the
significations of both are clearer for the contrast. At Grand Central, the
old is old and the new is pseudo-old. Both present and past are diminished
in favor of a spurious golden age.

Paddington Station has seen new life as the terminus of the Heathrow
Express, which whisks you from Heathrow Airport to Central London in 15
minutes on high-speed trains. The original station was built between 1850
and 1854 by the great engineer and railroad builder Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The renovation was designed by Nicholas Grimshaw, one of the most pragmatic
of British Modernist architects. Separated by more than a century, the
languages of the original and the renovation are remarkably similar. Both
designs were based on engineering and fine technology, but their expressions
and their technologies are radically different. It's this tension that makes
the "new" Paddington so successful.

Like Grand Central, Paddington had become "cluttered with ad hoc additions"
to quote Grimshaw, who saw his role as allowing the public to "appreciate
the old from a new standpoint." He has achieved this through the insertion
of stridently modern elements within the engineered delight of Brunel's
station.

One of the major design elements of Grimshaw's renovation is the station's
departures and arrivals board. It is a celebration of technology
incorporating architecture, industrial design, and digital graphics. It is
in stark contrast to the ironwork of the station itself, and yet because of
its sleek character it relates to both the station's architectural language
and the jetlike design of the trains. At Paddington the train shed is the
station, and the waiting trains become an integral part of the architecture.
The digital board mediates between these elements while retaining its
character and utopian associations.

At Grand Central the departures and arrivals board poses as an artifact from
the original station, a tasteful picture frame in which a digital sign has
somehow been inserted. It has none of the stature of the freestanding ticket
office on which it sits. In fact, the simple black electronic sign that it
replaced was a sleeker object with greater poignancy. An example of postwar
Italian industrial design, it was an explicit attempt to link a fading mode
of transportation with the modernity of international air travel. And in
contrast with digital silence, the sound of the old board clicking through
time and destination changes created an aural environment of urgency and
expectation.

Great historic buildings--not to mention the people using them--are demeaned
by renovations that pretend that time has stood still and that
"old-fashioned virtues" and utopian confidence have been preserved in a
vacuum. The buildings are deprived of irony, contrast, and the poignancy of
their unfulfilled dreams. As Robert Venturi perceived so acutely, they lose
the complex significance that is the fate of any building that survives its
original era. That fate is something to be celebrated, not denied.
Buildings, left to their own devices and the passage of time, create their
own richness. In the case of Grand Central, the clock showed that great
architecture can be treated with gaudy disrespect and be all the better for
the insult. The bad protects us from the relentlessness of the good. And to
one degree or another, the bad is inevitable. Trying to keep it out is like
trying to escape the Red Death in the Edgar Allan Poe story. The alternative
is a good taste that renders one place like any other. Thirtieth Street
Station in Philadelphia and Union Station in Washington are examples of the
consequence: a nationwide state of suspended architectural animation.

This is not to suggest that the clock should be resurrected, or the grime
restored to the Sistine ceiling. Once gone it can never be brought back. To
do so would be an act of the same pseudo-archaeology that infects all
nostalgia-based renovation projects. If we had been lucky enough to still
have it, it would be a gift of historic bad taste; to put it back would be
history repeating itself as farce. You cannot step in the same river twice.
Perhaps all of the inappropriate intrusions had to be swept away, like a
reptile shedding its skin, so that a new cycle can start again. We have to
wait and see. In the meantime, we miss the clock.

=================================
The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org


=================================
The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

------------------------------