7 ms·

The Price of Saving Grand Central Station

52 points by kposehn 8y ago

leoedin 8y ago
The UK is absolutely full of Victorian buildings which we go to great lengths to preserve. It's, I think, a reaction to the sixties when we were going to great lengths to pull them down. The problem is that you end up living in an architectural monoculture. There's literally millions of Victorian terraced houses in the UK now and endless endless rows of drab 30s semi-detached houses. It's a shame that there's less of a drive to build new things. Yes, you end up with failures and architectural mistakes, but you also end up with gems and truly interesting buildings. I don't know exactly what the answer is, but I think empowering more local small scale development, even if it means we lose a small percentage of Victorian terraces or semis, would be a start.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  Just to be clear: In the case described in the article, the justification was preservation for historical notability, not merely as a way to maintain architectural style (even if that was a non-official motivation for some people).
- surfmike 8y ago
  Architectural monoculture isn't necessarily a bad thing, compared to a post-modern collection of different styles. Some of the most beautiful cities/town in the world (think places like Italian coastal towns, Austrian mountain villages, or French countryside towns) have a consistent style.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  At least Victorian "monoculture" varied by region, city and often each estate or build. Style, architecture, features, layout, colour and grade of brick or stone and slate would all identify where in the country you were. Even trivia like windows, mullions, ridge tiles and so on were of the region, and sometimes even more local. This continued until maybe the 1950s. New build use the same standard, shite, boxes across the whole country. 5 sizes and styles of shitty box per estate. If you live in a National Park or similar your standard shitty box will be clad in local stone tiles. Trouble with losing the Victorian build is they were built to last much longer than those 1960s on. Current build are to a price (lowest possible). I agree we should go back to regional and small scale development, and for planning regs to require regional sympathy once again. I don't agree Victorian buildings are drab. I'd far rather live in one of those than anything post 1970 as they tend to be much more solidly built. Sure they have a few issues stemming from being 120 years old - the roof might be due its first replacement by now (if slate) etc
  - Joeri 8y ago
    Trouble with losing the Victorian build is they were built to last much longer than those 1960s on. I’m highly skeptical the average house built then outlived the average house built today, due to survivorship bias. The houses that remain are the ones built to last.
    - Retric 8y ago
      It's more obvious with larger structures. Reinforced concrete has a finite and relatively short lifetime. 300 years sounds like a very long time, but a significant fraction of 300 year old buildings are still around, we have such a large fraction of newer structures in large part because the worlds population is vastly larger today. At the smaller scale you see things like complex roof lines that are very hard to maintain.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      Have you ever lived in an older city? My first apartment in my city was built in 1910, and it was one of the newer buildings in that neighborhood. Even cheap railroad flats controlled by slumlords for 50 years are in better shape than the crap built in the early 90s. The fatal flaw of older frame houses is balloon frames, which burned many down. Growing up in the country, 100-150 year old farmhouses were common. I’m personally acquainted with 1 house and 3 barns built in the Dutch colonial period. IMO, most things built now except for custom homes and some commercial structures will be a pile of junk in 100 years. The wood sucks, the vinyl sucks and the foundations are weak. Scaled up developments are built to maximize tax benefits, period.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      Sure there is some survivorship bias, but the cheap mass housing of the Victorian or Edwardian eras are often still around. Not just from the famous Victorian philanthropist industrialists (Cadbury, Lever brothers, Rowntree, Titus Salt etc) with their model villages for workers, but even the cheap stuff built for the collieries and mills, or early social housing. The social housing of the 1930s have, thanks to their sell off, often become the desirable estates of today. Of course there's also been a fair amount of German bombing and slum clearing that's thinned out the older stock. There's some key differences in how things are built that mean there will be precious few 1970s and 2010s homes surviving for 300 years. Victorian: Single or rarely double skin brick for most internal walls. Until the 70s or 80s breeze block was an acceptable cheaper alternative. Resiliant against a dozen generations hanging pictures, making adjustments to rooms and features, hanging flat screen tvs etc. Adds significant natural sound proofing. Roofs built with large scale carpentry and joints. Remove every nail and bolt and the roof will still be gale and rain proof. My current house doesn't seem to ever have had any nails or bolts in the roof space. The 30s house I used to have seemed to have just a few token ones. Slate and small tile (shingles in the US?) should last around a century and be an easy replacement. Some of the cast iron gutters and rain goods will be shot after a century, but plastic often needs replacing after 30. Crucially the foundations are built, often providing a handy cellar, rather than being a weak pour of a foot or two of concrete. Sometimes comes with a downside. One house, in Manchester, was built with engineering brick. Even the internal walls. So damn tough it took time to get a drill or angle grinder into it let alone bang a nail in for a picture. :) New: Internal frame and plasterboard walls, sometimes between houses meaning limited hanging of tvs and pictures, and adjustments even for the first generation of occupants. 300 years of home improvements and decoration will not work here. Listen in on the neighbours with ease, even when you'd rather not. Roofs built from pre-assembled trusses. Lose the ironwork from age or rust and the whole roof will be on the brink of collapse as the steel joints are structural. Not amenable to loft extensions, storage or even surviving the decay that frequently affects the eaves (You can't replace the rotted part as easily as they're now part of the structure). The modern style of large tile and truss means roofs are much shorter lived (I'm told around 40 years). Now, if only there were some houses being built using pre-war methods and strength of materials with current levels of insulation, renewables and electricals we'd be golden for the future. :)
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
> Preserving the building did not, the majority said, constitute a “taking” of the property, depriving the owners of the opportunity to build to such an extent that they should be compensated. In the long term I see that being regarded among other high quality landmark rulings such as Wickard v. Filburn (that's sarcasm btw). There is already a means for the government to acquire control over private property, eminent domain and it involves compensation. Giving the government a magic wand they can wave at no cost to tell people what to do on their property is not appropriate.
- andrewla 8y ago
  Add to that Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed the taking of private property to give to another private party. As an odd bit of trivia, the dissent to Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City was authored by then-associate Justice Rehnquist and joined by J.P. Stevens. The opinion of the court in Kelo was delivered by Stevens, and Rehnquist, as chief justice, joined in the dissent. Rehnquist stood fast on preventing the restriction of the takings clause, while Stevens relaxed his stance.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Another solution was to call it a taking (which it was) and allow it after the city paid the property owners (which the city could have done). Basically, what the Court did was signal to developers that they must never build anything pretty or legendary that 50 years later might get termed a landmark. And I say this even though I'm ecstatic that Grand Central Terminal was saved, and very sad that Penn Station was not. These two opinions can co-exist. IMO the city should just have paid for the taking, or found some other way to compensate the owners. And the Court should have said so.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  From the opinion: "The trial court's grant of relief was reversed on appeal, the New York Court of Appeals ultimately concluding that there was no "taking," since the Landmarks Law had not transferred control of the property to the city, but only restricted appellants' exploitation of it." The plaintiffs wanted to tear down the building. They weren't allowed to. They were otherwise allowed to do whatever they wanted with the building as long as its visual features remained intact. This is not a taking. And it turns out that requiring them to maintain the station was the right decision in the long run--the station is now far more profitable than it would have been as just another crappy NYC office tower. Note also that Wickard v. Filburn reached the appropriate conclusion. In that case, a man grew wheat for sale and sold at least part of his production to out-of-state buyers. He grew more of it than allowed due to war-time restrictions, and used the excess to feed his own livestock. The court ruled that this violated the law. And that was completely correct. If he hadn't grown any excess, he would have needed to feed his livestock out of his permitted stock of grain, and would have had less to sell (if any) to others. Thus, a direct effect on interstate commerce.
julienchastang 8y ago
For those of you commuting through GCT tonight, look up at the main course ceiling. The ceiling was cleaned in the mid-1990s, but they purposely did not clean a small area to show the drastic change. You can actually see it in this picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/NYC_Grand_Central_Terminal_ceiling.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/NYC_Gran... Look in the upper-right corner by the ecliptic.
- ip26 8y ago
  This was due to coal-fired trains? Cigarettes?
  - julienchastang 8y ago
    Yes. Yes. And decades of accumulated grime.
    - Aloha 8y ago
      GCT has never had a coal fired train in it - its always been an electric only station, Penn is the same.
      - smpetrey 8y ago
        While that's true, it was only until 2003 smoking was banned completely from GCT.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Don't forget coal fired heating, and the air prior to clean air legislation. Smogs were a common occurrence and included industrial and coal smoke. Much like is seen in China and India today. Smogs were not just of Victorian London. :)
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Thanks. The tiny bit that goes into the white marble?
Endama 8y ago
Is there a middle ground where new buildings could be made with old-school aesthetics? I understand there is a strange Ship of Theseus situation here, but it seems that if the aesthetics are the concern, there shouldn't be any reason why a larger capacity building could be built in the old style.
- rootsudo 8y ago
  Cost and promise.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  I think the older style of building relied on a lot of labour (masons) and the cost of labour has gone up much more than other costs, so it's not tractable any more.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  The problem is that during the wave of modernization we had an entire generation of buildings that didn't need stonemasons, intricate woodwork, etc. As a result, no one replaced existing workers in those fields, and now we have nothing to draw from, at least in the US.
  - Endama 8y ago
    Excuse my ignorance here, but couldn't we just create molds and pour concrete to create the same columns accent pieces? Surely there are technological advancements that have allowed us to mimic stonemasons?
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      The problem is weathering. Weathered stone looks much the same as current stone; weathered concrete looks absolutely horrid. The Brutalist buildings that were all concrete have aged very poorly, with water and rust stains and moss present. You'd also need someone to actually make custom molds for every project; if you have nobody willing to do it at a reasonable price for stone, what makes you think they'll do it making molds? Plaster molds have been used to mimic this effect, but mostly it looks very bad and is used for things like tacky McMansions. Right now, the only material that works and looks good for the purpose is stone. There is a reason why stone countertops have remained a central piece of home furnishing throughout the years.
Nrsolis 8y ago
I can't take anything in the article seriously when they call Grand Central Terminal by the incorrect "station" name. Grand Central Terminal is called that because it's the end of the rail lines that arrive there. People who don't know still call it "grand central station".
- larrik 8y ago
  The article gets it right. The headline is wrong. It's possible the headline was written by someone else than the author.
  - geofft 8y ago
    For large news organizations, it's pretty common for headlines not to be written by the article author and the author to have no control over the headline.
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  They only call it Grand Central Station in the headline (and the caption of the title photo) and presumably that's because Grand Central Station is what most people in the world call it. They call it Grand Central Terminal in the first sentence of of the article.
- kposehn 8y ago
  Frankly I forgot to correct it when I posted it here as well - thanks for pointing that out.
GiraffeGlove 8y ago
Cities could continue to modernize and add density if zoning would allow hybrid architecture additions similar to several buildings in Toronto. The outside facade and interior remains while larger, modern and dense buildings are added around and above the older landmarks. A good example of this is the current hockey hall of fame. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/01/01/saving_torontos_heritage_buildings_the_smart_way.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/01/01/saving_torontos_...
rmason 8y ago
When I was a kid I used to visit the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit with my dad. When I was in college I actually took a train from Lansing one Thanksgiving into the grand old station. In it's day it matched Grand Central Station for its beauty. But for the past forty years it sat empty, lots of graffiti and broken windows. You've probably seen it in pictures of Detroit, it frequently is used to highlight the ruin of the city. Ford announced they bought it to headquarter their autonomous car research efforts. They're planning on filling the ground floor with shops and are giving money away to community groups in the neighborhood. I can't wait for the rehab to be finished, along with the old Packard plant which is also being rebuilt there will be far fewer examples of what the locals call 'ruin porn' for the press to use to write the Detroit story. In fact the old depot can in the future be used to write the story of Detroit's rebirth. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2018/06/18/ford-rolls-out-plans-train-station/712142002/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...

52 points by kposehn 8y ago

The UK is absolutely full of Victorian buildings which we go to great lengths to preserve. It's, I think, a reaction to the sixties when we were going to great lengths to pull them down. The problem is that you end up living in an architectural monoculture. There's literally millions of Victorian terraced houses in the UK now and endless endless rows of drab 30s semi-detached houses. It's a shame that there's less of a drive to build new things. Yes, you end up with failures and architectural mistakes, but you also end up with gems and truly interesting buildings. I don't know exactly what the answer is, but I think empowering more local small scale development, even if it means we lose a small percentage of Victorian terraces or semis, would be a start.

jessriedel 8y ago
Just to be clear: In the case described in the article, the justification was preservation for historical notability, not merely as a way to maintain architectural style (even if that was a non-official motivation for some people).
surfmike 8y ago
Architectural monoculture isn't necessarily a bad thing, compared to a post-modern collection of different styles. Some of the most beautiful cities/town in the world (think places like Italian coastal towns, Austrian mountain villages, or French countryside towns) have a consistent style.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
At least Victorian "monoculture" varied by region, city and often each estate or build. Style, architecture, features, layout, colour and grade of brick or stone and slate would all identify where in the country you were. Even trivia like windows, mullions, ridge tiles and so on were of the region, and sometimes even more local. This continued until maybe the 1950s. New build use the same standard, shite, boxes across the whole country. 5 sizes and styles of shitty box per estate. If you live in a National Park or similar your standard shitty box will be clad in local stone tiles. Trouble with losing the Victorian build is they were built to last much longer than those 1960s on. Current build are to a price (lowest possible). I agree we should go back to regional and small scale development, and for planning regs to require regional sympathy once again. I don't agree Victorian buildings are drab. I'd far rather live in one of those than anything post 1970 as they tend to be much more solidly built. Sure they have a few issues stemming from being 120 years old - the roof might be due its first replacement by now (if slate) etc
- Joeri 8y ago
  Trouble with losing the Victorian build is they were built to last much longer than those 1960s on. I’m highly skeptical the average house built then outlived the average house built today, due to survivorship bias. The houses that remain are the ones built to last.
  - Retric 8y ago
    It's more obvious with larger structures. Reinforced concrete has a finite and relatively short lifetime. 300 years sounds like a very long time, but a significant fraction of 300 year old buildings are still around, we have such a large fraction of newer structures in large part because the worlds population is vastly larger today. At the smaller scale you see things like complex roof lines that are very hard to maintain.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Have you ever lived in an older city? My first apartment in my city was built in 1910, and it was one of the newer buildings in that neighborhood. Even cheap railroad flats controlled by slumlords for 50 years are in better shape than the crap built in the early 90s. The fatal flaw of older frame houses is balloon frames, which burned many down. Growing up in the country, 100-150 year old farmhouses were common. I’m personally acquainted with 1 house and 3 barns built in the Dutch colonial period. IMO, most things built now except for custom homes and some commercial structures will be a pile of junk in 100 years. The wood sucks, the vinyl sucks and the foundations are weak. Scaled up developments are built to maximize tax benefits, period.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Sure there is some survivorship bias, but the cheap mass housing of the Victorian or Edwardian eras are often still around. Not just from the famous Victorian philanthropist industrialists (Cadbury, Lever brothers, Rowntree, Titus Salt etc) with their model villages for workers, but even the cheap stuff built for the collieries and mills, or early social housing. The social housing of the 1930s have, thanks to their sell off, often become the desirable estates of today. Of course there's also been a fair amount of German bombing and slum clearing that's thinned out the older stock. There's some key differences in how things are built that mean there will be precious few 1970s and 2010s homes surviving for 300 years. Victorian: Single or rarely double skin brick for most internal walls. Until the 70s or 80s breeze block was an acceptable cheaper alternative. Resiliant against a dozen generations hanging pictures, making adjustments to rooms and features, hanging flat screen tvs etc. Adds significant natural sound proofing. Roofs built with large scale carpentry and joints. Remove every nail and bolt and the roof will still be gale and rain proof. My current house doesn't seem to ever have had any nails or bolts in the roof space. The 30s house I used to have seemed to have just a few token ones. Slate and small tile (shingles in the US?) should last around a century and be an easy replacement. Some of the cast iron gutters and rain goods will be shot after a century, but plastic often needs replacing after 30. Crucially the foundations are built, often providing a handy cellar, rather than being a weak pour of a foot or two of concrete. Sometimes comes with a downside. One house, in Manchester, was built with engineering brick. Even the internal walls. So damn tough it took time to get a drill or angle grinder into it let alone bang a nail in for a picture. :) New: Internal frame and plasterboard walls, sometimes between houses meaning limited hanging of tvs and pictures, and adjustments even for the first generation of occupants. 300 years of home improvements and decoration will not work here. Listen in on the neighbours with ease, even when you'd rather not. Roofs built from pre-assembled trusses. Lose the ironwork from age or rust and the whole roof will be on the brink of collapse as the steel joints are structural. Not amenable to loft extensions, storage or even surviving the decay that frequently affects the eaves (You can't replace the rotted part as easily as they're now part of the structure). The modern style of large tile and truss means roofs are much shorter lived (I'm told around 40 years). Now, if only there were some houses being built using pre-war methods and strength of materials with current levels of insulation, renewables and electricals we'd be golden for the future. :)

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

> Preserving the building did not, the majority said, constitute a “taking” of the property, depriving the owners of the opportunity to build to such an extent that they should be compensated. In the long term I see that being regarded among other high quality landmark rulings such as Wickard v. Filburn (that's sarcasm btw). There is already a means for the government to acquire control over private property, eminent domain and it involves compensation. Giving the government a magic wand they can wave at no cost to tell people what to do on their property is not appropriate.

andrewla 8y ago
Add to that Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed the taking of private property to give to another private party. As an odd bit of trivia, the dissent to Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City was authored by then-associate Justice Rehnquist and joined by J.P. Stevens. The opinion of the court in Kelo was delivered by Stevens, and Rehnquist, as chief justice, joined in the dissent. Rehnquist stood fast on preventing the restriction of the takings clause, while Stevens relaxed his stance.
cryptonector 8y ago
Another solution was to call it a taking (which it was) and allow it after the city paid the property owners (which the city could have done). Basically, what the Court did was signal to developers that they must never build anything pretty or legendary that 50 years later might get termed a landmark. And I say this even though I'm ecstatic that Grand Central Terminal was saved, and very sad that Penn Station was not. These two opinions can co-exist. IMO the city should just have paid for the taking, or found some other way to compensate the owners. And the Court should have said so.
gamblor956 8y ago
From the opinion: "The trial court's grant of relief was reversed on appeal, the New York Court of Appeals ultimately concluding that there was no "taking," since the Landmarks Law had not transferred control of the property to the city, but only restricted appellants' exploitation of it." The plaintiffs wanted to tear down the building. They weren't allowed to. They were otherwise allowed to do whatever they wanted with the building as long as its visual features remained intact. This is not a taking. And it turns out that requiring them to maintain the station was the right decision in the long run--the station is now far more profitable than it would have been as just another crappy NYC office tower. Note also that Wickard v. Filburn reached the appropriate conclusion. In that case, a man grew wheat for sale and sold at least part of his production to out-of-state buyers. He grew more of it than allowed due to war-time restrictions, and used the excess to feed his own livestock. The court ruled that this violated the law. And that was completely correct. If he hadn't grown any excess, he would have needed to feed his livestock out of his permitted stock of grain, and would have had less to sell (if any) to others. Thus, a direct effect on interstate commerce.

julienchastang 8y ago

For those of you commuting through GCT tonight, look up at the main course ceiling. The ceiling was cleaned in the mid-1990s, but they purposely did not clean a small area to show the drastic change. You can actually see it in this picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/NYC_Grand_Central_Terminal_ceiling.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/NYC_Gran... Look in the upper-right corner by the ecliptic.

ip26 8y ago
This was due to coal-fired trains? Cigarettes?
- julienchastang 8y ago
  Yes. Yes. And decades of accumulated grime.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    GCT has never had a coal fired train in it - its always been an electric only station, Penn is the same.
    - smpetrey 8y ago
      While that's true, it was only until 2003 smoking was banned completely from GCT.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Don't forget coal fired heating, and the air prior to clean air legislation. Smogs were a common occurrence and included industrial and coal smoke. Much like is seen in China and India today. Smogs were not just of Victorian London. :)
lostlogin 8y ago
Thanks. The tiny bit that goes into the white marble?

Endama 8y ago

Is there a middle ground where new buildings could be made with old-school aesthetics? I understand there is a strange Ship of Theseus situation here, but it seems that if the aesthetics are the concern, there shouldn't be any reason why a larger capacity building could be built in the old style.

rootsudo 8y ago
Cost and promise.
chrisseaton 8y ago
I think the older style of building relied on a lot of labour (masons) and the cost of labour has gone up much more than other costs, so it's not tractable any more.
bobthepanda 8y ago
The problem is that during the wave of modernization we had an entire generation of buildings that didn't need stonemasons, intricate woodwork, etc. As a result, no one replaced existing workers in those fields, and now we have nothing to draw from, at least in the US.
- Endama 8y ago
  Excuse my ignorance here, but couldn't we just create molds and pour concrete to create the same columns accent pieces? Surely there are technological advancements that have allowed us to mimic stonemasons?
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    The problem is weathering. Weathered stone looks much the same as current stone; weathered concrete looks absolutely horrid. The Brutalist buildings that were all concrete have aged very poorly, with water and rust stains and moss present. You'd also need someone to actually make custom molds for every project; if you have nobody willing to do it at a reasonable price for stone, what makes you think they'll do it making molds? Plaster molds have been used to mimic this effect, but mostly it looks very bad and is used for things like tacky McMansions. Right now, the only material that works and looks good for the purpose is stone. There is a reason why stone countertops have remained a central piece of home furnishing throughout the years.

Nrsolis 8y ago

I can't take anything in the article seriously when they call Grand Central Terminal by the incorrect "station" name. Grand Central Terminal is called that because it's the end of the rail lines that arrive there. People who don't know still call it "grand central station".

larrik 8y ago
The article gets it right. The headline is wrong. It's possible the headline was written by someone else than the author.
- geofft 8y ago
  For large news organizations, it's pretty common for headlines not to be written by the article author and the author to have no control over the headline.
RandallBrown 8y ago
They only call it Grand Central Station in the headline (and the caption of the title photo) and presumably that's because Grand Central Station is what most people in the world call it. They call it Grand Central Terminal in the first sentence of of the article.
kposehn 8y ago
Frankly I forgot to correct it when I posted it here as well - thanks for pointing that out.

GiraffeGlove 8y ago

Cities could continue to modernize and add density if zoning would allow hybrid architecture additions similar to several buildings in Toronto. The outside facade and interior remains while larger, modern and dense buildings are added around and above the older landmarks. A good example of this is the current hockey hall of fame. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/01/01/saving_torontos_heritage_buildings_the_smart_way.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/01/01/saving_torontos_...

rmason 8y ago

When I was a kid I used to visit the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit with my dad. When I was in college I actually took a train from Lansing one Thanksgiving into the grand old station. In it's day it matched Grand Central Station for its beauty. But for the past forty years it sat empty, lots of graffiti and broken windows. You've probably seen it in pictures of Detroit, it frequently is used to highlight the ruin of the city. Ford announced they bought it to headquarter their autonomous car research efforts. They're planning on filling the ground floor with shops and are giving money away to community groups in the neighborhood. I can't wait for the rehab to be finished, along with the old Packard plant which is also being rebuilt there will be far fewer examples of what the locals call 'ruin porn' for the press to use to write the Detroit story. In fact the old depot can in the future be used to write the story of Detroit's rebirth. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2018/06/18/ford-rolls-out-plans-train-station/712142002/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...