 Good afternoon and welcome. I am Pat Parazzini, Director of Alumni Engagement, Regional Chapter Development for Fairfield University, and I am so thrilled to be able to bring this presentation to you via Zoom. In my position here at the university, I had the pleasure of working with alumni from across the country, coordinating with chapter leaders and volunteers to host events that keep alumni connected too, and engaged with Fairfield. We have nine regional chapters from Boston and Washington DC alphabetically, and from Boston to San Francisco geographically. I hope to meet you all in person at an event in your local area in the very near future. Before I introduce our esteemed guest presenter, I would like to go over the format of the lecture today. It is a PowerPoint slide presentation, and our guest lecturer will be speaking to those slides. We'll have a break midway at the end for questions. Please type your questions via the chat function on the Zoom, and I will relay them to our guest, and please make sure your video and audio capabilities are turned on. Today, I have the great honor and pleasure of introducing Dr. Kurt Schlickding. Dr. Schlickding, Fairfield University, is the E. Gerald Corrigan 63 Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences Emeritus. At Fairfield, Dr. Schlickding served as the Dean and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Waterfront Manhattan from Henry Hudson to the Highline, 2018, is his third book for Johns Hopkins University Press. Grand Central Terminal 2002, won the Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional Scholarly Book in Architecture and Urbanism. Grand Central was the basis for the 2008 PBS American Experience Grand Central, an award-winning documentary. Dr. Schlickding was the academic advisor and appeared on screen. His academic research is at the cutting edge of the field of Historic Geographical Information System, HGIS, which he used to study the Irish in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. In the spring of 2017, he was a visiting fellow at the Moore Research Institute, National University, Ireland, Galway. Currently, he is co-director of the NYHGIS, New York Historic GIS, centered at the New York Public Library, and is an advisor to the Library's Center for Digital Humanities. He remains active at Fairfield University, serving as co-principal investigator for the Center for Social Actions major project to conduct a needs assessment for the United Way of Grants, Connecticut. Kurt and I have partnered three times on events for the New York City Alumni Chapter, two tours of Grand Central Station, and one of the New York City Waterfront, and these events are always sold out. I give you all, Dr. Kurt Schlichting. Listen, it's great to see you here, everyone, to be together virtually. I've done these Grand Central tours for many years, and a little shameless self-promotion on the right-hand side. You see the Grand Central book, and I follow that up with Grand Central's engineer in 2011, and my most recent effort is Waterfront Manhattan from Henry Hudson to the High Line, which does include the railroads. What we want to do is we want to think about Grand Central. Of course, this is the Grand Concourse, and it's the most visited space, interior space in the city, and the clock in the middle of Grand Central is a place where you can meet. All you have to do is see you at the clock in Grand Central, and anyone who knows the city knows the clock in the center of the Grand Concourse. But what I wanted to do today is I wanted to place this in the context of the Vanderbilt family. The people are familiar with the Vanderbilt family. It's a name that reverberates down in history, and it begins with Cornelius Vanderbilt, and he built an empire before he got into the railroad business. So for example, you can see that before that, he was born in Staten Island. He came from a farming family. They weren't wealthy at all. When he was about 17 years old, he borrowed some money from his mother and bought a small sailboat. It was called a peri auger. It was a Dutch design, a flat bottom boat, and Vanderbilt began to offer service back and forth between Staten Island and Lower Manhattan Island, the tip of Manhattan Island. And he prospered in that. He was involved in the early steamboats in New York Carver, the steamboat empire, and he builds an empire. He runs steamboats up to Albany, New York. The passage between New York and Albany was incredibly vibrant because the year he canal ended in Albany and people wanted then to get to New York City. And he traded up and down with the cities along the Hudson River. He organized a steamboat service between Manhattan Island on the East River between Manhattan Island and Long Island Sound to Greenwich, Bridgeport, New Haven, and all the way up to Stonington, Connecticut, which you may know is at the very end, it's the last town in Connecticut before you enter Rhode Island. But from there, he organized a railroad line or there was a railroad line that would take you to Providence and then on to Boston. And it was much quicker than sailing to Boston from New York Harbor, you had to go around Cape Cod. So he organized that. And then during the civil, during the, during the, not the civil war, during the gold rush, people are desperate to get to California. Well, you could go by a wagon train across the country or you could sail around Cape Horn. And that would take months. Four months was not unusual. Five months to get around from New York by a sailing ship around the worst water in the, in the world, Cape Horn, and then up the coast of South America and then up to California. So what Vanderbilt does is he organizes a steamship service between New York and Nicaragua, the coast of Nicaragua on the Caribbean side. And then you could take a boat up a river to Lake Nicaragua and then travel across Lake Nicaragua where there first would be a horse drawn carriage is waiting. And then later on a small railroad line down to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua and ships would be waiting and they would be steamships as well to take you to San Francisco and the gold fields. He was married to his first wife Sophia for a number of years. He had 13 children, 10 girls and three boys. And the three boys are listed on the right hand side William Henry. He'll inherit most of the commoner's wealth. He had a son Cornelius who wasn't very successful, was a nerdy well who actually committed suicide in 1882. And he had a son George who just had an ordinary life and wasn't really part of the Vanderbilt Empire. Well, then it's now during the Civil War, 1863, and Vanderbilt gets into the railroad business. He's 69 years old. Well, he really didn't build railroads. He took over railroads that others had pioneered. So for example, he gained control of the New York and Harlem, the Hudson River Railroad and then the New York Central. Now the Hudson River, the New York and Harlem started as a horse-drawn train service between the city of New York, which was down at the very end of Manhattan Island and the village of Harlem. It was a village up on the island. There was farmland in the middle of Manhattan Island. And then people went to Harlem, wealthy people in New York went to Harlem, especially in the summertime to escape the heat and especially to escape the communicable diseases which would often break out in lower Manhattan Island. The Hudson River Railroad was organized by a group of investors in Poughkeepsie, New York, who wanted to have rail service from Poughkeepsie to New York, to the tip of New York, Manhattan Island. And they did that. And then finally, the New York Central, it's a saga, they built a railroad parallel to the Erie Canal, linking Albany with Buffalo. Now you might wonder, well, why did they build a railroad when they had the Erie Canal? Well, the canal froze in the wintertime. And by the way, so did the Hudson River. It was eight separate railroads at one point. And I think there were two more added for a total of 10. And then finally, they were put together and they formed the New York Central Railroad, one railroad company. Well, Vanderbilt takes control of that as well. And in 1869, he goes up to, he has his people go up to Albany, New York with a carpet bag, with carpet bags filled with money. And he gets the state legislature in New York to pass a bill to form the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. And he combines those three railroads and it's the New York Central. So for example, today, when you go to Grand Central and you ride on the Harlem River, the Harlem Division, you're riding on basically the tracks of the New York and Harlem, which eventually went up to Harlem, then crossed over into the Bronx, then went up into Westchester County and they went all the way up to close to Albany, New York, that no longer have trains that far. And then when you ride the Hudson Division along the Hudson River, you're riding on the tracks where the Hudson River Railroad was originally organized. And the Hudson River Railroad and the Harlem had an enormous advantage. They had train service to Manhattan Island. The Hudson River Railroad went all the way down. The shoreline of the Hudson River, all the way down almost to City Hall. And they could service the piers along the Hudson River. And it was an enormous advantage. The other railroads, the large railroads all had to come to New York, but no one of them, no one else, no other railroad could gain access to Manhattan Island. And that was an enormous advantage the New York Central had for many, many, many years. Well, the three, the grant, the railroads, the two railroads that are now the New York Central, they also needed a place to have a terminal that combined the service to all, to both of them and to the New Haven Railroad, which they had signed an agreement with for 401 years that gave the New Haven the right to run its trains on the tracks of the New York and Harlem down into Midtown Manhattan. Well, the passenger service just grows and grows, especially with the addition of the New York Central Railroad. And they needed a terminal. And they, the railroad owned land at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue that the New York and Harlem used to use to store its trains and to service its trains. And Vanderbilt's decides that's gonna be the place he's gonna have his consolidated terminal, his passenger terminal. And when he announces plans for this first Grand Central, there's enormous outcry. What are you talking about 42nd Street? New York is not above Houston Street. So you'd have to take a horse car and you can see the trolleys in front of the terminal. You'd have to get on a trolley down in Lower Manhattan Island and ride that trolley up to 42nd Street. Or if you were wealthy, your private carriage would take you up to 42nd Street. And this is the first Grand Central. And behind it was a very large train yard that was open at ground level and it was prosperous. The railroads were the only way to travel. It was the only way you could get to the Midwest was to go by train. There were obviously no airlines. So the railroads really did rule supreme. And this was a very, very elaborate terminal building that Vanderbilt had constructed at 42nd Street. And you can see Vanderbilt Avenue, that Vanderbilt Place just to the left of the first Grand Central. And also it creates this dynasty, the dynasty of the Vanderbilt family. There's a good biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt called the First Tycoon by E.J. Stiles, which is very, very good. But he basically builds the greatest fortune in the world. So when Vanderbilt dies in 1893, 1877, I'm sorry, he had the largest fortune in the world by many estimates. So what does he do? Well, he leaves the bulk of his fortune to his one son, his eldest son, William Henry. Now he leaves money to some of the daughters, but what they do is they go into court and they sue because they wanted more money. And that lawsuit of contested will drags on in the press in the courts for over a year. And Vanderbilt's reputation is dragged through the mud by the sisters and their attorneys. It was a food fight. Now, William Henry inherits this giant fortune, which would be estimated about five or almost $6 billion in 2020. And he has six children. He has four sons and two daughters. And the third generation are gonna be the generation that build the new grant. Well, Grant Central, the first Grant Central helps pull the city of New York father up the island. And the railroad is very, very successful. Passenger, the number of passengers passing through the first Grant Central increases year after year after year. And that particular building is not working. So that in the early 1890s, they commissioned, the railroad commissioned a rebuild of that first Grant Central. And that's Grant Central too. And you can see that on the right-hand side. You can see a picture of that. And you can see, by the way, you can see that the area around Grant Central has grown. And they added two stories over the original story and a half, and they made the building more accommodating. But the problem was they only had 13 tracks. And it was the volume of traffic, passenger traffic couldn't be accommodated bit those 13. Those 13 tracks. So what they did is they announced an architectural competition. And in the next slide, we'll see William Wilgus, he was the chief engineer. And he announces, the railroad, the New York Central Railroad, announces an architectural competition in 1903 for the new building. But they were going to not only build a new Grant Central, they were going to put the underground train yard, I'm sorry, they're going to put the train yard underground and you'll see that in a moment. And they invite major architects, the major architects in the country to submit plans. And among those who submitted plans were Daniel Burnham, who had designed the Chicago's World's Fair, Stanford White from the famous McKim, Mead and White, they submitted plans and Carriere and Hastings, who were a partnership, they had designed the New York Public Library, they had won that competition. So this was the major architects, American architects of the time submitting plans, participating in the architectural competition. Well, lo and behold, the firm of Reed and Stem of Minneapolis wins the competition. Now they were a major, they were a firm that had designed a number of terminals for the New York Central System, but much smaller in scale. And they had nowhere near the reputation of Daniel Burnham or a Stanford White or a Carriere and Hastings, but they won the initial competition. Well, it turns out that William Wilgus, who we'll meet in just a moment, was married to Stem's sister. So they win the competition. Reed's sister is married to William Wilgus. And really, he's the hero of the Grand Central Story from my perspective. He was born in Buffalo, New York, as you can see. He went to high school, didn't go to college, but to be an engineer at this particular period of time, there were only a few places that you could study engineering. One was the Naval Academy. The second was at West Point, and the third was at Cornell University. So that he goes to work for the railroad, as you can see in 1893, and he has a meteoric career at the New York Central. And by 1901, he's the chief engineer. Now, what he does in 1903 is to put together a plan for a new Grand Central. And in a six page memo to the president of the railroad and to the board of directors where the two Vanderbilt, third generation, they were there, and so was J.P. Morgan. So it was a very distinguished board of multi-millionaires. And I simply said that it's, I'm not the first to say this, but a multifunctional plan of staggering genius. It really is an unbelievably complicated plan. Look, what they're gonna do is the train yard is up at ground level. They're gonna put that underground. They're gonna build a two-story underground train yard. And of course, you can't use steam to run that particular underground train yard because what are you gonna do with the steam? So they have to electrify. Well, that sounds easy to our ears, but at the time, no one had built large electric trains. They had trolleys, and they run by electricity with a 25 horsepower engine. Well, you're gonna need three or 4,000 horsepower engines to pull the big, heavy trains in and out of Grand Central. Well, once they've put the train yard underground, then Wilgus argues that they've created air rights, the space above this underground train yard, and they can build then a large, large real estate development in Midtown Manhattan, which Wilgus calls Terminal City. And the revenue from Terminal City is going to pay for the entire Grand Central project, which was going to be millions and millions of dollars in 1903 dollars. Well, getting back to the competition. So this is the plan that won the initial competition. It's not the Grand Central that we see today. It's certainly a huge building, fronting on 42nd Street, and the idea is that it would have 12 stories of revenue producing space, and that would pay for the Grand Central project. And the New Haven Railroad was a partner in this because they ran their trains to 42nd Street as well. And they were in favor of the Read and Stem Plan. And Wilgus makes the rental income is part of the financing of this new Grand Central. Well, enter Whitney Warren. Whitney Warren. Whitney Warren was an architect who's going to play a major role in the Grand Central project. And in Wilgus' auto, in his unpublished autobiography, he writes, in the latter part of 1903, Warren and Whitmore proposed themselves in connection with the Grand Central design. He also writes, he said, there was a knock on his door and Whitney Warren comes in and says, well, I'm going to be part of the design of the new terminal. Well, who's Whitney Warren? Well, he was born in Troy, New York and lived in New York City. His father was a lawyer and financier. For those of you who know Newport on Narragansett Avenue was, they had a summer home. He was a member of Mrs. Aster's 400, you know, the height of the, the height of the social world in New York City. And then what he does is his father sends him to the Echo de Beaux Arts, which is, we're going to get to that in a moment. It was an architectural school in Paris. And he's socially prominent. There's a large story about him when he marries his wife and he attends fancy dress balls that the Vanderbilt's give. He goes sailing or yachting on Cornelius William K. Vanderbilt's yacht. So he's socially prominent and certainly well connected. And this is the Echo de Beaux Arts. So that in this era, after the Civil War from 1865 to 1915, it's called the Age of Energy. The United States comes to become the leading industrial country in the world. New York is the preeminent city in the United States. And there's a search for an architectural style. And what emerges out of this is what we call the Beaux Arts. And the school was located on the left bank in Paris. You can see this, the picture on the right is a modern picture. The buildings are still there. It's not an architectural school now. It's an art school. But in that those windows that you can see on the second floor are where the library is. And I went there to look at Whitney Warren's school records when he was at the Echo de Beaux Arts. And it really was designed as a place to teach architects to build for the French monarchy and the French aristocrats. So it was monumental style. But what you didn't do is you didn't go and just sit in the series of lectures as you would at an American university, for example. What you did is you studied in a studio and Whitney Warren joined the, they're called Atterrières, Dumont and Giralt. And then the curriculum was organized around the series of architectural competence. So the architects would go down to the Echo de Beaux Arts. They'd go into the library building. And what they do is they design an architectural project, a major project to design a library, to build a palace. And they had to sit down and from scratch they had 12 hours to do some early sketching and to outline the project. And then that would be judged. And if you pass that first hurdle, you then would return to your studio for about two months and you'd work up a complete design and then you'd return to the Echo de Beaux Arts, you'd turn to the Beaux Arts building and then someone would be judged as a first prize or a series of second and third prizes. Now Paris at the time was a major, major destination. It was the city of lights. And it was bohemian and romantic to be on the left bank. A famous American architect, Louis Sullivan, said it was the damnedest pigsty I ever got into. But Aaron spent a decade there and he came back well to an America that was looking for an architectural style and others that went to the Echo de Beaux Arts, other Americans who went to the Echo de Beaux Arts came back trained as these architects at a monumental scale. And the most important one is Richard Morris Hunt. He was the first American to study at the Echo. He returns. He has a fabulous career. He builds the facade, the Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The World Colombian Exposition in Chicago. He designed some of the white city buildings. And then in Newport, Rhode Island, as you can see, he is the court architect. He's the court architect for the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Golets. And he's just has a fabulous career here in Newport, Rhode Island. And here's a perfect example of the Beaux Arts. This is the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. It's an Imperial facade. This is classical Greek and Roman architecture. It's grandeur on a monumental scale. And critics labeled it the Imperial facade, but it's perfect for the Gilded Age. It's perfect for New York City, which wants to be not just this country's major city, but one of the major cities in the world. So you have projects like the New York Public Library, the Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum. You build the architects of the Rhode Island State House. And the middle picture here is the White City to celebrate the anniversary of Columbus coming to the Americas. And they built down on the water in Chicago. They built this White City. The buildings were built out of plaster, but they were a major tourist attraction while in 1893 when the celebration opened. And you can see that on the right hand side you have the Paris Exposition, which is Bo Arts. And in a sense that that influences the White City. And then in Newport, Rhode Island, here's the two mansions of the Vanderville Third Generation, the Third Generation, William K. And if you've been to Paris and you go out to Versailles and you walk through the Hall of Mirrors, you can see what William K. wanted and what Richard Morris Hunt was capable of doing. And the Gilded Age, the Gilded Age continued. The Vanderbilt's William K. also had a mansion on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. You can see the fancy Gilded Age social life that Whitney Warren was involved in. So he knew the Vanderbilt's socially. He went to their parties. He was really part of the Gilded Age in New York City. And of course, the other brother, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, he had William Morris Hunt design the breakers which was built and opened in 1895. Now, here's part of the story of Whitney Warren. We're back to Whitney Warren. In Newport, there's the Newport Country Club founded in 1893, and they decide to build a clubhouse a year later. And they form a syndicate. These are the members who are socially prominent and they're gonna organize an architectural competition for the design of the clubhouse. And you can see William K. is there, Cornelius II is there and the brother, Frederick Vanderbilt is also on this committee to choose the architect. Well, they go out to out in Newport, they go out to Ocean Drive, and they buy a piece of land and that's where they're gonna build the country club and Warren wins the design. He wins the design and that's celebrated. And you can see it's a beautiful building overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and it's, so this is his first major project when he gets back from the Echo de Beaux Arts, gets back from Paris. And then the New York Yacht Club. Well, first of all, in 1898, Whitney Warren has a partner, Charles Wetmore, who's a wealthy lawyer. Well, the New York Yacht Club was founded in 1844 and they needed a new clubhouse from the first clubhouse on Madison Avenue. And J.P. Morgan owns some property on West 44th Street, so we donated that to the Yacht Club. And they announced an architectural composition. There were 11 submissions and Warren wins. He wins in 1899. By the way, Warren had submitted a plan for the New York Public Library but didn't win that architectural composition. Cornelius Vandervilt, William K. Vandervilt were members of the New York Yacht Club. And I think they influenced the choice of Whitney Warren to design the club. But on the other hand, Warren was a really fabulous architect and he understood the Beaux Arts style. You have a central space and I'm gonna point that out in Grand Central in a moment. And for the New York Yacht Club, you walk in the front door, there's a stairway that takes you up to a landing. You turn to your left and you go up into the model room and the building was designed around the central space. Down the street at the New York Public Library, the central space is the reading room on the third floor and the stairs bring you up to that space. That's a principle of the Beaux Arts. Well, what Whitney Warren does is he takes, he completely abandons a plan for a revenue building over the 42nd Street's facade. And what he does is he designs this classical Beaux Arts building, the building that we see today. Now, what the New York Central did was they forced Reed and Stem to join with Warren and Wetmore in associated architects. And that was something that was forced on Reed and Stem. They had no choice if they wanted to still be involved in designing the two-story underground train yard, for example. And William K. Vanderbilt played a key role in this. He demanded a monumental Beaux Arts building. He convinced J.P. Morgan what they wanted was a statement about their railroad and to some degree to themselves. This is the Vanderbilt's. And so they're gonna not only design Grand Central, they're gonna build Terminal City. And that's a perfect Beaux Arts project. You're gonna build this monumental building and you're gonna build up Park Avenue over the underground train yard. And the New York Central Railroad could do this because they were in control of that particular part of Midtown Manhattan. Midtown Manhattan wasn't a center of the city's commerce by any stretch of the imagination when this project begins. In fact, if you went over to where the UN is now, there were slaughterhouses. There was no refrigeration. You had to slaughter pigs and you had to slaughter cattle in order to have fresh meat. And then they just dumped it into the East River. And here's looking down Park Avenue. This is New York's Grand Boulevard, just like the Grand Boulevard's in Paris. You, and it's anchored by what was the New York Central building, which was designed by Whitney Warren. And then the buildings that you see coming up Park Avenue, I'm sorry, coming up Park Avenue are buildings that were thematic. They were Beaux Arts. They were to create this view down to Grand Central Terminal. And it extended from 42nd Street to 51st Street, including the Waldorf Astoria, and then the church that's next to, this was a huge project. And remember, going back here, the train tracks that were on 42nd Street are now underground. The terminal itself is now underground. And we, and so this deck is built over Park Avenue and it creates this terminal city. And it really is a Beaux Arts masterpiece, the whole design for the building. You have the central space is the Grand Concourse. All of the corridors come off the Grand Concourse and it included three hotels. The Roosevelt Hotel, the Commodore Hotel, and the Biltmore Hotel. And all of this is integrated. That was the Read and Stem plan. And that part of the plan was carried out. And then you have the facade and the facade is this Beaux Arts masterpiece. Well, it proceeds along and then the grand opening is on February 1st, 1913. And this is a beautiful picture of the Grand Concourse just the night before Grand Central was going to open. But getting back to William Wilgus, Wilgus is in part of this. He leaves the railroad in 1907 and he's not part of the service. And he's not part of the ceremonies opening this magnificent building in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Well, by 1913, the railroads really did rule supreme. You've got to remember there were very few, there was some commercial airline service. But if you wanted to get anywhere as a passenger, you needed to ride these glamorous trains of the New York Central if you wanted to get to Chicago. You wanted to ride the 20th century limited. So it really was a time when the railroads were supreme. There was no interstate highway. If you wanted to ship anything across the country, you needed the railroads. So I think we'll stop here and take a brief break. I do have a few questions. Okay. Alrighty. So first one, how much control did Cornelius Vanderbilt's grandsons have over the plans for the new Grand Central Station moving forward from 1903? Now, they really were in, they were completely inferential in the particular part of it is to, is to replace the read and stem building with the Grand Central that we see today. That was the key part where they had a great deal of influence. And they insisted that Whitney Warren participate in that project, that part of the project. Okay. Okay. And I have a question because I remember from the tours we did at Grand Central Station, whatever happened to Wilgus and why did he leave New York City in 1907? Well, it's a complicated story. The electrification is taking place. And the first new electric engines from General Electric are pulling the trains back and forth into the old Grand Central. Well, in, in February 1907, a train leaves Grand Central, goes up through the Bronx. It's, it's late at night. It's going fast. It goes off the tracks in the Bronx and 21 people are killed. And it threatens the entire Grand Central project because the politicians say they're going to indict the two Vanderbilt third generation brothers. They're going to indict them for manslaughter. They're going to pass legislation that says you can't use electric engines on Manhattan Island. Well, everybody starts blaming everyone else inside the railroad and Wilgus gets caught up in that. And basically he resigns. And I found in his papers at the New York Public Library a brochure for the opening day. And he writes it's in his pen. He's written on with a pen. My name is not included. And it wasn't included, but he went on to a very, very successful career as an engineer. And, but that's why he left the railroad. Okay. But was he involved in the opening ceremonies in 1913? He was not. He was not included in the opening ceremonies in 1913. He was forgotten. Oh dear. Okay. There's another question from Linda and Tom. Who was Campbell and what is the background? The apartment. You know, I've, I've spent a lot of time in Grand Central around Grand Central. It was a space that they really didn't know what to do with. So a wealthy businessman Campbell used it as his office. And it become known as the Campbell apartment. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to, uh, Pat, I'll just, I'm going to stop my share here. Alrighty. And I'm going to get my next module. And I'm going to, um, I'm going to start that show. And then, uh, Pat, uh, I first of all, then have to share my screen. I'm going to open this. Well, we, uh, we left it at, at the railroads try triumphant. And that was true. And you can see some data there from 1910, but major, major changes about, about the happen. And that's, that's the highways and the highways come with, and you can see in, in 1931, uh, the city of New York, the Port Authority builds the George Washington bridge. And in the foreground is the tracks of the New York Central Railroad. By the way, the New York Central Railroad had to pay property tax on that property that they owned where they had their train tracks. They had to do that everywhere. Their, their tracks went. We build the highways at public expense in the sense that we, the Port Authority uses the tolls for the people driving over the bridge to build the George Washington bridge. And then in the highway, the highways take over. And what we do is we regulate the railroads. That's a story that probably needs another session, but there's great animosity toward the railroads as being all powerful. And so in 1906, we set up the ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and we regulate the railroads and prices. For what the railroads operate go up, but they don't allow much of a, of an increase. And then the, that really it's the automobile age. And it'll 1900, there's only 8,000 automobiles in the United States. And then we build the interstate highway system. And the railroads can't compete. They can't compete with that publicly subsidized mode of transportation. And in the, in, in the New York metropolitan region, the electrification of Grand Central wasn't for just the terminal itself. We built the grant, the railroad built what are called the electric zones. And this allowed it allowed people to commute. So you could become a commuter. And the Long Island Railroad did the same thing out in Long Island. And that then allows for people to suburbanize, to leave the city. And perfect example of that is Levittown. And the people who, especially the veterans of the Second World War, who could afford to move to Levittown, thought they had died and gone to heaven. Even these are very modest homes, but it was much better than a crowded apartment in the Lower East Side. Well, what happens then is the city goes into a downward spiral. It's the death of the New York Central. It can't, in the Depression, it doesn't have a dividend. It's the automobile in the truck age after World War Two. And the railroads go bankrupt, basically. And in fact, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad, who were great rivals for a long, long period of time, they merged together along, basically, organized by the Congress in the United States. And they formed the Penn Central Transportation Company. And then Penn Central goes bankrupt in 1970. And all of us who remember going to Grand Central Station at this period of time, it was falling apart. The railroads had no money to maintain that structure. And it's the near death in New York. Jimmy Carter goes to the South Bronx. That looks like Berlin at the end of the Second World War. And all of us who knew New York at that period of time, you went to the East Village and the tenements were abandoned. And the street people took over. The squatters took over. West Side Highway is falling apart. They had to be closed. And then the city is ready to go bankrupt. And that's that famous headline, forward to the city, drop dead. And then there's the destruction. Pennsylvania Station was the rival of Grand Central. It was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad. They built a tunnel under the Hudson River. Then a tunnel over to Long Island. They built a terminal building that was as magnificent as Grand Central. And not only did the city have Grand Central, it also had Pennsylvania Station. It was a Boards masterpiece. And it was torn down in 1963. They begin the demolition of Penn Station. And now was Vincent Scully, a famous architectural historian from Yale, said, if one entered the city like a god, one scuttles in now like a rat. And any of us who or any of you who use Penn Station or even go to Penn Station occasionally, it's awful. It's really awful to be there. Scully was right. Well, the New York Central is bankrupt. And what does it decide to do? It decides to demolish a building behind Grand Central in a baggage building and a parcel building. And then to sell that to a developer in 1962, that developer builds the largest office building in the world. And it overshadows Grand Central doesn't it does it to this day. You got to Grand Central and down Park Avenue. You can see how it overshadows everything else. And by the way, if you look at this particular picture on the right hand side of looking down Park Avenue, the original bow arts buildings with one exception have been replaced by a series of glass walled buildings, including the famous Sigmunds building. Well, Grand Central's at risk. Not only does what excuse me. The railroad says, well, look, if we've already allowed the Pan Am building to be built, well, we have space over Grand Central, air rights over Grand Central, and we can build another office building. And there were a series of proposals on the far left. You can see one that's directly over Grand Central. You can't see the you can't see the terminal any longer. Well, that was scaled back. And the railroad decided to go to the most one of the most prominent modern architects of the time, Marcel Brewer, and he had a particular design that the railroad said, yes, let's do this. If we if we if we built the if we built the PNM building, let's build this other building. Well, there's a real reaction here. And it's the public to the rescue. And it's led by Jackie Kennedy. And you can see Mayor Koch there on the right hand side. But the city in 1965 passes the landmarks preservation law. And Grand Central is designated as a landmark. It has landmark status. In fact, that's the second building in the city. That is designated a landmark. Well, this enormous court battle unfolds. The Penn Central goes to court and says, listen, this is a taking of our property without compensation. You can you can designate this as a as a landmark, but we want the equivalent of the revenue we would have received from our building. Well, this goes through, you know, it's in the supreme. It's goes, it's in the courts for a decade. And finally in 1978, the Supreme Court upholds the landmarks preservation law. But that doesn't solve the problem. The Penn Central now is bankrupt. The deterioration of Grand Central has continued. The roof leaks. Street people are living in in the tunnels down under Grand Central. It's a nightmare to go there. So they organize a rescue. Well, first of all, you first of all nationalize what's left of passenger railroads, passenger railroads, that's Amtrak. Then in the New York metropolitan region, you set up the Congress sets up Conrail. Then later, New York state and Connecticut, both charter the Metro North commute computer commuter railroad. And the MTA says, we're going to rebuild. They hire a number of firms. The most important one is buyer Bender Bell and buyer Bender Bell comes back and says, this is going to cost 90 to $100 million to save the building. Then they bring in consultants with cell partners and they had renovated Union Station in Washington DC and turned it into a destination. And that saves Union Station. And that's what they're going to do at 42nd Street. They're going to restore. And they're going to make Grand Central. Not just a place to go to catch Metro North, but to go, go and celebrate. So they start to restructure. They start to renovate and they have to rebuild the mechanical structure. This is what we don't see. I was down in front of that rotary converter there on the left hand side, which converts direct current to alternating current or I'm sorry, alternating current to direct current. And I was with a group of engineers from Metro North. And they said, you know, we were trying to run these things when we first came here. And he said, you know, we couldn't call General Electric. That was built by General Electric and order a part. We had to go to a machine shop and have them fabricate the part. So it was very expensive. It cleaned the exterior. They restore the, the famous Zeus and, and Hercules statutes that are fixed to the front of the, the building. They rebuild the lower concourse. They, they have a, they, they go to court and argue that the building is a private building. It can be closed at night. That gets them this then this, and they work with the city to have the street people who were sleeping in the building removed. They restore the Vanderbilt room they restore. And of course they restore the grand concourse. And that took a year to do or two years to do. I'm sorry, two years to do. And many of you might remember going to the grand central then, and they're doing the restoration and notice the bottom picture. They're cleaning the, the zodiac, the famous ceiling of grand central, which was covered in soot. And it turns out it was nicotine from the millions of people who went through grand central every day and people at the time smoke incessantly, and they had to just clean that off. And they restored it so we can go and we can see this. And many of you know that on the west side facade up on the, up on the ceiling, they left one patch of the ceiling, not clean to remind us of how, how bad it was. Well, it was, it really was a rebirth. It's a place to go, fancy restaurants, places to have a drink. The Campbell apartment is a very, very expensive place to stop in and have a libation, but it works because all of that high end retail, that revenue pays for the bonds that the MTA and had to float to get the money to do the restoration. So it has worked. And every year their high end retail produces more than enough revenue to pay those bonds back. So it was a success. And this is New York's really main plaza. It's certainly the plaza for the, for the midtown Manhattan. You know, if you're going to New York and you want to meet someone, you say, I'll meet you at the clock. That's by the way, we're Pat and I always start our, our, our tours of Grand Central. We just meet at the clock. Everybody knows where that is. It was a rededication in 18, 1980, 98. Jackie Kennedy was dead by that particular time. And John Kennedy there on the right, and Governor Putaki and then the president of the railroad and president of the MTA are there to celebrate the rededication of, of the restoration. And Grand Central celebrated its a hundredth anniversary on February 1st, 2013. I was involved in that and I'll just tell one quick story. I got in touch with the American Association of Architects. I'm sorry. The American Association of Mechanical Engineers. And they were going to dedicate a plaque. And I talked with the, the president in DC and then the New York president. And everyone was on the same page. And they said, no, we need a plaque to recognize. We'll guess his contribution. And that plaque was installed on February 1st, 2013. Well, the, the impact of Grand Central on New York and midtown Manhattan never ends. And many of you, some of you may know, they're bringing the Long Island railroad to Grand Central. And you can see in these schematics, they've dug down 90 feet through the rock below the lower level and use tunnel boring machines to bore out these tunnels under Park Avenue that you can see on the bottom left. And those tunnels will bring Long Island. An estimated 150,000 passengers a day on the Long Island, from the Long Island railroad to midtown Manhattan. Now they needed a new terminal space for this particular addition to Grand Central. So this is going to toss, it's going to cost by the way $10 billion to do this. The tunnels have been bored. I've been down there. I've seen them. It's fabulous. Well, what did they do? Well, a developer had bought the block next to Grand Central on 42nd Street. And they go to the city. They go to Bloomberg, the Bloomberg administration and say, we'll donate $100 million to this project to build this access to the Long Island railroad on Vanderbilt Place. However, we want to build the highest building in midtown Manhattan. And the city of New York said yes. So that's how they got the project done. And they're well on schedule now. But here's our last picture of Grand Central. And most of us are not ever up on the roadway that goes around Grand Central, but there's a statute there. It's there. It's below Hercules. And who's it? Well, it's the Commodore Vanderbilt. This by the statute was on a building they owned along the west side of Manhattan, way downtown near City Hall, St. John's Park, where they had a freight building. And they saved that and they put it on a pedestal for overlooking Park Avenue. So I'm going to end here. And I hope you enjoyed our, our online tour of Grand Central. We got to talk about the Bo Arts, which hopefully you can understand better now. And I thank all of you. I do actually have a couple of questions. Okay. If you don't mind. Not at all. Someone asked, where is the plaque to Wilkes located in Grand Central? It's located across from where you, where you, you can buy Metro North tickets. It's, I think it's, I should know this, shouldn't I? I think it's 44, track 44. And you can see the plaque there. I do remember, I do remember I'm picturing because when you and I did the tour with the New York alumni chapter, I can picture that as well. And Nina also asked another question back to the Campbell apartment. She had heard that it was used as a holding pen jail. Is that true? I don't, I've heard, you know, there's a lot of myths about Grand Central. I don't know the answer to that. It possibly is. There's also, by the way, people don't, most people don't know this, that in, in the very front facade of Grand Central, there's space up above where the statutes are. There's space up there. Right. That includes an indoor tennis facility. By the way, up there as well as a giant office space where they run the railroad from. I do remember you telling us that. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, that's where they run the railroad from. Well, Kurt, as always, it is such an honor to partner with you on these events. I cannot thank you enough for sharing your time, your talents and your expertise with all of us. I want to thank those who attended our tour today. And just to let you know, we will be continuing to provide life long learning experiences being zoomed. Our next is Thursday, April 30th at four, when we will take a visual journey of 19th century America through the art of Winslow Homer, with Professor Phillip Eliza. Do visit fairfield.edu backslash alumni events. And you can see everything that's going on with these online experiences throughout the university. Again, I thank you all so much. I look forward to seeing you again. Until then, be well and stay safe. Stay safe. Take care. Take care. Thank you. I'll see you on Monday. Stay safe. Yeah. Take care. Take care.