Grand Central Terminal:100 Years of a New York Landmark by A. Robins & the NY Transit Museum - STC

Grand Central Terminal 100 Years of a New York Landmark THE NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM with Anthony W. Robins Introduction by Tony Hiss

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Beaux-Arts Splendor

When the crowds entered Grand Central on February 2nd, 1913 - after ten long years of planning, demolition and new construction - they found themselves in a miraculous place. Beyond brilliant engineering and planning, the new Terminal offered New Yorkers a sophisticated and beautiful design, combining architecture, sculpture and painting - all reflecting the latest fashions from Paris.

John B. Snook had modeled the Commodore’s Depot after the Louvre. Bradford Gilbert had given the Station more of a French neo-Classical look. But the new Terminal took French influence to an entirely new level: a thoroughly Parisian building on a New York avenue, designed by a Paris-trained New York architect who preferred to live in France.

Though just one among many Americans who studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the French capital, Whitney Warren spent more time there than most, imbibing the Gallic approach to architecture.

He lived in Paris as a student for a full decade, from 1884 to 1894, and then returned in 1914 and stayed through the end of World War I, during which time he organized the Committee of American Students to support the families of Ecole students sent to the front. He continued to spend time in Paris, on and off, for the rest of his life.

Not only did Warren bring a Parisian sensibility to his own design for the Terminal, based on his years of study at the Ecole - he also arranged for three Ecoletrained Parisians to bring their talents to the project:

Jules-Félix Coutan, who designed the monumental sculpture on the 42nd Street facade; Silvain Salieres, who sculpted architectural ornament throughout the complex; and Paul César Helleu, who sketched out the enormous painting on the ceiling above the main concourse. Warren and his colleagues draped modern French style over the latest in American planning and engineering.

“The new Grand Central Terminal was thrown wide to the public at midnight last night.... beginning with today, the newest gateway to New York will be ready for the traveling public. Through that gateway in the coming twelvemonth close to 24,000,000 persons will pass on their way to and from the biggest city in the Western World.”

— NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 2, 1913

“The magnitude of the undertaking, especially the cost... and the wonders of architecture and of luxurious embellishment will of themselves identify this building and its approaches as one of the phenomenal modern structures of the world.”

— WASHINGTON P OST, JANUARY 25, 1913

2. Grand Central Terminal Main Concourse.

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The Ecole des Beaux-Arts In the United States, the term “Beaux Arts” now refers to an architectural style of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But to the American architects who studied in Paris at the time, “Beaux Arts” was the name not of a style but of a school - the “Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” or “School of Fine Arts” - and of the method of study it employed.

The Ecole trained France’s future artists and architects, but also permitted entry to foreigners who could meet the school’s requirements. In Paris, the students’ course of study revolved around two poles: the Ecole itself, and an atelier, or workshop. At the Ecole, students attended lectures in such subjects as the history and theory of architecture, ventilation, acoustics, legislation and contracts. In the atelier, they learned the art of architectural design by sitting at the feet of a master. Students advanced by way of competitions in which they sketched out designs, often modeled on ancient monuments, which they then developed into detailed projects, in beautifully designed drawings and water-colors. The most advanced students (French only - foreigners not eligible) competed each year for the profession’s most prestigious student award, the Prix de Rome - “the Rome Prize” - whose winner spent five years, at government expense, at the French Academy in Rome.

In Warren’s day, American students favored certain ateliers, and Warren chose the one led by Honoré Daumet and Charles Louis Girault. Daumet and Girault designed grand public buildings modeled on classical or Renaissance sources, with the over-sized columns and arches and elaborate sculptural detail that came to characterize the American Beaux-Arts style. They also paid careful attention to a principle central to all Beaux-Arts architecture - the discipline of planning, both the careful interior layout of the building, and its equally careful arrangement in the urban landscape, preferably placed strategically to create a grand vista.

Back home, Warren became a champion of the Beaux-Arts educational method. In 1894, on his return to New York, he joined several other Ecole alumni in founding the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects - not just, as he was later quoted, “to keep the old crowd together with all its joyous memories,”

but also “to continue our teachings and traditions, to keep the flame alive and to hand on the torch to those who were to come after us in our own country.” He later served as the director of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, but was perhaps better known as the organizer of the Beaux-Arts Ball, a lavish annual fundraiser for the Society’s educational programs.

Warren became one of the great American exponents of the Beaux-Arts style, as well as the method, and in Grand Central Terminal he created one of New York’s finest Beaux-Arts monuments.

“Too many people are accustomed to thinking of the Beaux-Arts student only in the terms which he himself so delights to emphasize - the terms of the Quatz Arts Ball and burning floats and flowing bowls and slim grisettes dancing in renaissance fountains. They forget how prodigiously one must work to have any real spirit for such fantastically abandoned play; and they are generally unaware that the great majority of these same riotous students are paying their own way through the school and working, scores of them, outside while still keeping up with their studies.”

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— THE BOOKMAN: A REVIEW OF BOOKS AND LIFE, OCTO B E R 1 9 1 6 ( P. 1 1 3 )

2. Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts rue Bonaparte c. 1890, Photograph by Adolphe Giraudon

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Whitney Warren at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts

“In France, a young man who desires to become an architect ... joins an atelier...a studio for the study of architecture only, presided over by the master or patron, who is an architect in practice.... In his early days in the atelier he doubtless learns more by the criticism and help freely given him, if he is a good fellow, by the elder pupils, than by the supervision of the master.... But the eye of the master is on him from the first, and as he makes his way forward in the work of the atelier, he finds the relation between master and pupil becomes close, almost paternal.... Once placed, the master becomes to the pupil the chief link which binds him to the great tradition in architecture which the French claim has never been broken with them, and which has descended from master to pupil from the days of the Renaissance....”

“The education in architecture in France is above all things artistic.... The object of the French training is to render the student receptive; to make him fruitful in design, and imaginative. By making the training very general in character, it hopes to foster that gift with which all artists should be born, namely, the gift of having ideas.”

3. Whitney Warren, a drawing of the Church of the Colégio, Ponta Delgada, Azores, 1895, from his student days at the

— THE BRITISH ARCHITECT, MARCH 8, 1907 [P.165]

Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum

4. Above, the Petit Palais in Paris, designed 1899 by Charles Louis Girault. Photograph by Wayne Andrews

5. In 1899, one of Whitney Warren’s first major commissions, the New York Yacht Club, brought the flavor of Daumet and Girault’s Paris atelier to West 44th Street in Manhattan, where

— T H E B R I T I S H A RC H I T E CT, MARCH 8, 1907 [P.165]

it still stands.

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6. Whitney Warren’s facade for Grand Central, East 42nd Street facing Park Avenue, 6

photographed in the 1930s. The classical inspiration, the gigantic columns, the overscaled arched windows - 60 feet tall by 30 feet wide - and the program of monumental sculptural ornament, all mark the Terminal as a

Grand Central Terminal: The Exterior

product of the Beaux-Arts vision.

“Mr. Warren leads the way - literally as well as figuratively, for he is a leggy enthusiast - from his Madison avenue office…to a point on the southern sidewalk, where the vastness of the terminal building, seen on two sides, properly smites you. There is the facade in gray limestone, with its pillars and triumphal arch windows in triple rows, a group of sculptured figures at the highest centre, and at the extreme corners the stone carved coats-of-arms of New York City and State. There is detailed ornamentation in wreath, oak leaf and other patterns, but all sparingly applied. The style is a modified French Renaissance; the effect is monumental.”

“Warren & Wetmore present a perspective of the new Grand Central Station for New York...as visible from Park Avenue. A splendid opportunity is here presented as, placed upon the axis of this important avenue, the entrance may be seen from a distance, a favoring condition seldom found in this congested city.”

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Grand Central Terminal, facades on Vanderbilt Avenue and East 42nd Street. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

8. Looking north on Park Avenue from East 38th

— THE ARCHITECT AND BUILD I N G N E WS ,

Street towards Grand Central. The Terminal’s

FEBRUARY 18, 1905 (P.V)

unusual siting in the middle of Park Avenue a serendipitous product of railroad history rather than of architectural design - gave Warren the opportunity to plan the building as the focal point of a typically Beaux-Arts vista set at the end of a broad thoroughfare.

— NEW-YORK TRIBU NE, DECEMBER 15, 1912 [P.B8]

Photo Credit: Corbis 8

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9. Cornice detail. The attention to ornamental detail, even at the roofline where it would be barely visible from the street, shows the care lavished on the building’s facade, so typical of the Beaux-Arts approach.

Photograph by Frank English, 1988.

10. Wreaths surrounding the letters “NYC” on the eastern corner of the 42nd Street facade. Courtesy of the Warren & Wetmore Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

11. Carefully carved exterior details. Photographs by Frank English 11

12 12. Carefully carved exterior details. Photographs by Frank English