Grand Central Terminal

Story

Most people who pass through Grand Central Terminal look up — at the famous turquoise ceiling of the Main Concourse, its constellation mural stretching across 12,000 square feet of vaulted sky. What almost nobody notices is that the sky is backwards. The stars are painted as a mirror image of the actual night sky, with east and west reversed. Astronomers pointed this out not long after the terminal opened in 1913, and the response from the New York Central Railroad was essentially a shrug: the ceiling depicts the medieval manuscript from which the design was drawn, not the sky as you'd see it standing on Earth.

The terminal itself opened on February 2, 1913, replacing two earlier stations on the same site, the first dating to 1871. The architect Warren and Wetmore drove the Beaux-Arts design, though the interior circulation system — ramps instead of stairs, split-level platforms — came from engineers Reed and Stem, and from New York Central vice president William J. Wilgus, who conceived the radical idea of sinking all tracks underground to unlock the real estate above. That decision shaped Midtown Manhattan for the next century.

By the 1960s, the terminal faced demolition. Penn Station had just been torn down in 1963, and Grand Central was next in the crosshairs of developer Morris Lapidus and others. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became the most visible face of the preservation campaign, and in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld New York City's landmark protections in a decision that effectively saved the building. A $200 million restoration completed in 1998 stripped decades of grime from the ceiling, revealing the constellation mural's original viridian and gold — and confirming, once again, that the stars are still facing the wrong way.