This is a really interesting New York Times video on the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The station turns 100 in 2013 and a number of events are scheduled to commemorate the opening of the busiest railroad terminal in the world.
Sam Roberts, from the New York Times discloses some of the secrets the place hides.
Self-study activity:
Watch the video and list all the secrets Sam mentions. Then get together with a friend and explain to them everything you have found out about Grand Central. You can check your answers with the transcript below.
This activity is suitable for intermediate students.
Hello, not much, I’m talking to a wall, what about you?
Shh! Can you keep a secret? This is the whispering gallery in Grand Central Terminal in New York. It’s an acoustical marble that allows a person to whisper into a wall, then bounces across the vaulted tiled ceiling and you can hear the person at the other end about 30 or 40 feet away. It’s one of those great secrets of Grand Central Terminal.
I’m Sam Roberts of the New York Times. Grand Central is celebrating its centennial in February. It opened in 1913. This was the gateway to the continent for so many people, so many ideas, so much culture. It just captures people’s imagination in ways that almost no other building in New York have. It is emblematic of New York because it created Park Avenue, it also created Midtown in New York. This is now the busiest railroad terminal in the world, the biggest in the world. What’s so fascinating about Grand Central is that it’s also a building that contains many secrets. Everybody knows about the famous clock facing Grand Park Avenue from the front façade of Grand Central. You can actually climb up to a tiny little room upon ladders to access it. This clock, like all the clocks in Grand Central is set by atomic weight set by the National Observatory and it is extremely accurate.
The train board which lists when the trains are leaving are always wrong or they actually leave about a minute later than the time scheduled departure on the train boards.
It has the deepest basement in all of New York City, deeper than the World Trade Center, deeper than the Federal Reserve Bank.
I am just coming out of the secret staircase right in the middle of the main concourse of Grand Central. In fact, it’s in the information booth. This leads not to the sewers but the lower level information booth.
And of course the biggest mistake in Grand Central is the ceiling. It was discovered by one commuter not long after Grand Central opened that the sky is backwards. An astronomer from Columbia University gave a chart to the painters, but he probably thought they were going to hold it over their heads to paint. In fact, they put it down, and therefore what we have is a sort of heavenly view of the stars that looks at the stars from above rather than look at the stars from the main concourse itself.
Last year 82 million passengers came through Grand Central. When this Terminal was opened in 1913 the projections were that it would be able to hand 100 million. It’s now on the verge of doing that, which just goes to show what a miracle Gran Central was, an engineering miracle, a landmark miracle when it was built a century ago.
