When the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky traveled to the Americas in 1925, he was taken aback by the view from his train, which had carried him from the Texas border town of Laredo to New York, cruising across Manhattan into the sparkling Grand Central Terminal. This is how he described the scene in his collection of essays My Discovery of America:

"Even more striking [than Penn Station] is Grand Central, which towers over several blocks. The train skims through the air at a height of three or four stories. The smokey steam engine is replaced by a clean, non-spluttering electric one – and the train plunges underground. For a quarter of an hour there will still flash below you the green-entwined railings – chink of quiet, aristocratic Park Avenue. Then this too finishes and there stretches out half an hour of subterranean city with thousands of arches and black tunnels, streaked wit gleaming rails: every roar, thump and whistle pulsates and hangs on for quite some time. The gleaming white rails go yellowish, then red, and then green from the changing colors of the signals. In all directions, there seems to be a tangle of trains, choked with arches. They say that our emigrants, arriving from the placid Russian quarter in Canada, at first cling dumbfoundedly to the window, and then start whooping and lamenting, ‘We’ve had it, mates, we’re being buried alive! How can we get out of this?’"

During our recent visit to Grand Central, we had the privilege of entering the seldom-visited towers of the terminal and hearing the story of the building of the “subterranean city” and “tangle of trains.” A couple of weeks ago, Cindy attended a lecture on the fascinating history of the New York City subway map by John Tauranac (his website and maps are worth checking out). While there, she met Paul Kalka, the president of the New York Railroad Enthusiasts, and he graciously extended an invitation to the club’s annual open house. The instructions were as follows: “Meet at Grand Central at 7 o’clock, next to track 23.”

We arrived at the appointed time and place, and there milling around the track entrance we met Paul and several other club members. After corralling the troops, we were taken up a nearby service elevator and through the catwalks inside the windows above Grand Central’s main concourse to the Williamson Library. The library has been the home of the New York Railroad Enthusiasts since 1937, and inside is a treasure trove of material befitting the club’s name.

The centerpiece of the evening’s entertainment was a lecture by Russell Guibord, the great-grandson of Arthur Bateman Corthell, one of the chief engineers of construction of the Grand Central Terminal. Before the current structure was completed in 1913, a huge section of Midtown Manhattan was a vast train depot, trains belched coal smoke across the city as they approached the terminal, and the broad, leafy Park Avenue was not in existence. This vast public works put the depot underground – the “subterranean city” Mayakovsky described – electrified the tracks, and buried the rail lines entering Manhattan 50 blocks to the north. The magnificent main building on 42nd Street is the only evidence of the project on the surface, but much of the underground network of track was the handiwork of Corthell.

In addition to a fascinating lecture, Russell, who had traveled all the way from Maine to speak, brought with him surprise – he donated all of his great-grandfather’s papers to the Williamson Library. Russell had come across the papers by accident more than thirty years ago while visiting his great-grandfather’s former home in New Hampshire, and he has spent the intervening years poring over the correspondences, architectural drawings and photographs. Now the collection will be passed on to the worthy stewards at the NYRRE.

We would like to extend our thanks to the the New York Railroad Enthusiasts for their warmth and hospitality. We hope they occupy a special place in Grand Central for 70 more years, and we look forward to attending more of their events in the future. To learn more about the NYRRE, visit their website. Their library is open by appointment for research purposes – just send an email to their general information address (info@nyrre.org).

If you would like to learn more about railroads in and around New York, visit the NYRRE’s links page, or check out some of these suggestions:

The New York Transit Museum, the official museum of the MTA, located in downtown Brooklyn.
Take a tour of the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel (and read our blog post about it).
The New York Museum of Transportation in Rush, NY (near Rochester). This museum has the only surviving cars of the Rochester subway – yes, Rochester had a subway.

For questions or comments about this blog post, please contact andrewg@urbanoyster.com.

The USS New York, a slick new Navy warship, sailed into New York harbor Monday to much fanfare. The amphibious transport dock was built as a floating memorial to the attacks of September 11, 2001 - steel recovered from the World Trade Center site was used in its construction. The ship is currently docked next to the permanently moored Intrepid on Manhattan's West Side, where it is scheduled to remain until Veterans Day, November 11. The vessel will be officially commissioned into the US Navy on Saturday.

Though constructed in Louisiana, the New York continues the connections of the city and the state to a long and proud shipbuilding tradition. There have been six previous New Yorks in the US Navy, three of which were built in the state. The first such vessel was actually part of the first American fleet, though it was little more than a large canoe. The American Navy was born in Whitehall, New York, at the southern tip of Lake Champlain, far from any ocean, in 1776. The ships were hastily built to halt the British southern advance down the lake; though 11 of the 16 American ships were destroyed, including the New York, and the Americans were forced to retreat, the Battle of Valcour Island did delay the British enough to force them into winter quarters far north of their objectives in the Hudson Valley (for more on this fascinating history, check out the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum across the lake in Vergennes, Vermont).

The second New York, a frigate built in a Manhattan shipyard in 1800, saw action in the Mediterranean during the Barbary Wars and the naval conflict with France. It spent most of its life laid up at the Washington Navy Yard until it was burned by British troops during the War of 1812.

Far larger than a canoe or a frigate, and a far more famous vessel was the battleship USS New York which served in two world wars and was built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Laid down in 1911, the New York participated in the blockade of Germany during World War I. In the Second World War, it saw action in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, providing cover for the invasion of North Africa in 1942 and the assault on Iwo Jima in 1945. After being decommissioned, it was used as a target ship for the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946, which it miraculously survived mostly intact, though the ship was finally laid to rest as a target for conventional weapons in 1948. About 70 sailors who served aboard the battleship will be on hand for the commissioning ceremony on Saturday.

The New York is a memorial to September 11, but it will only be in the city temporarily - a more permanent memorial to the tragic events is taking shape in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, however. Architect Michael Arad has erected a mock-up of the National September 11 Memorial in the Navy Hospital campus. You can find out more about the memorial here, but you will get to sneak a peek at the model if you come on a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  There are just two tours remaining this year - Sunday November 8 and Sunday, November 22. Tickets are available here. These tours are possible thanks to our ongoing partnership with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation and the Brooklyn Historical Society.

For questions or comments about this blog post, please contact andrewg@urbanoyster.com.