Grand Central Terminal’s Whispering Gallery

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New York is a magical place.  I always describe it as such.  It is not just the abject filming locations, gorgeous architecture, and surplus of history that make the city so majestic, but the little, notable things that seem to be tucked around every corner.  Take for instance the Whispering Gallery at Grand Central Terminal.  On the lower level of the landmark train station is a small alcove framed by four pillared archways.  Commuters and tourists rush through it everyday, hurriedly passing underneath the tiled bows, taking no note of its symmetrical beauty or its acoustic secret.  Linger a few minutes in the 2,000-square-foot chamber, though, and you will undoubtedly see friends enter together, wander to opposite corners, turn to face the pillars, and then either immediately proclaim “How cool!” or start giggling.  Their exuberance is due to the fact that the curvature of the Gallery’s ceiling provides a seamless path for low-level sound to travel up one side and down the other, arriving in the ear of a listener 50 feet away.

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I first read about the phenomenon shortly before my inaugural visit to New York in 2004.  The guidebooks I purchased in preparation for the trip didn’t specify exactly where in Grand Central the Whispering Gallery was located, though, and I somehow got the impression that it was part of the Main Concourse.  So, on our first sojourn to the station, the Grim Cheaper and I excitedly headed to opposite corners of the grand room, turned and faced the walls, and, like a couple of idiots, proceeded to whisper to each other.  Neither of us heard a peep, outside of the hustle and bustle of commuters, and walked away from the experience thoroughly confused, I am sure drawing quite a few laughs from Manhattanites in the know.  Thinking the Whispering Gallery was a hoax, we never re-visited the search on any of our subsequent trips to the Big Apple.  I did not even think about the site until years later, in fact, when I happened to mention our failure to fellow stalker Owen, of the When Write Is Wrong blog, during our first meet-up, which took place in NYC in 2009.  Owen was quite familiar with the Whispering Gallery, knew of its exact location, and assured us it was real.  While he wanted to show it to us that day, unfortunately we ran out of time.  But he vowed that on our next visit, he would take us there.  Though it took 7 years for that visit to materialize, Owen made good on his promise.

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As he showed us, the Whispering Gallery is located on Grand Central’s lower level, in the Dining Concourse, just outside of the iconic Oyster Bar.

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The rotunda, which is actually a convergence of three commuter corridors, was constructed, along with the rest of Grand Central Terminal, in 1913.  The vaulted space was designed by Rafael Guastavino and his son, Rafael Guastavino, Jr., of the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company.  The duo, who also created domed masterpieces at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the City Hall subway station, and the Bronx Zoo Elephant House (just to name a few), utilized their signature technique to create the Gallery.  As the Metropolitan Transportation Authority website explains it, “Guastavino’s method of arch construction uses layers of thin, glazed terracotta tiles set in mortar in a herringbone pattern.  The tiles are naturally fireproof and as strong as steel or wooden beams but weigh much less.”

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The result is a dazzling display of gilded masonry.

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And yes, a scientific curiosity.  Thanks to the laws of physics and the Gallery’s parabolic-curved ceiling, two friends can stand at opposite corners of the room, face the wall, whisper to each other, and those whispers will magically be heard.  The GC and I tested it out, with Owen acting as our guide, and I am happy to report that the phenomenon is absolutely real – and so incredibly cool.

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There are differing beliefs as to whether or not the Guastavinos intended the effect.  The New York Times quotes architect Frank J. Prial, Jr., who worked on the 1990s restoration of the terminal, as describing the acoustical occurrence as “a happy coincidence.”  Apparently, during the restoration project, Prial’s firm, Beyer Blinder Belle, did not come across any evidence that the sound effect was deliberate.  But author Lisa Montanarelli states in her book New York City Curiosities that the Guastavinos “designed the whispering gallery based on architectural principals that have been used for centuries worldwide – from the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to the Temple of Heaven in Beijing to the Gol Gumbaz in Bijapur, India.”  Regardless if the phenomenon was accidental or intended, the Whispering Gallery is a fabulous “secret” site, one that I cannot more highly recommend visiting and testing out for yourself.

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The Whispering Gallery is also a filming location!  In the 2011 remake of the movie Arthur, Naomi (Greta Gerwig) shows the unique spot to Arthur (Russell Brand) during their first date and he proceeds to officially ask her out – via whisper, of course – while there.

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My friend Katie, who runs Matthew Lillard Online, let me know that Cereal (Lillard), Dade (Jonny Lee Miller), Kate (Angelina Jolie) and the gang skated through the Whispering Gallery at the end of 1995’s Hackers.  Thanks, Katie!

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The Gallery is also said to have been featured in the 1996 romcom Breathing Room, but unfortunately I could not find a copy of it anywhere with which to make screen captures for this post.

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The Oyster Bar, also designed by the Guastavinos, has been featured in a couple of productions, as well.  Though we did not venture inside the historic eatery during our Whispering Gallery stalk, I figured it still bears mentioning here.  The restaurant popped up a couple of times in the 2016 thriller The Girl on the Train.

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That same year, Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling) dined there with Dr. Hunter Aloysius ‘Hap’ Percy (Jason Isaacs) in the Season 1 episode of The OA titled “New Colossus.”

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Though a scene in the Season 1 episode of Mad Men titled “Red in the Face” was set at a supposed New York City oyster bar, the specific oyster bar wasn’t mentioned.  Countless websites state that filming of the segment took place at Grand Central, but that information is erroneous.  The AMC series was shot almost in its entirety in Los Angeles and the “Red in the Face” scene was lensed at Musso and Frank Grill in Hollywood, as detailed in this post.  Being that Musso’s (as the eatery is commonly called) looks nothing like Grand Central’s Oyster Bar (as you can see below), I am unsure of how the confusion came to be.

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Another “secret” spot in Grand Central that we checked out while in New York last April was a section of dirty ceiling in the Main Concourse.  When the room’s massive rooftop mural was cleaned in the mid-90s (a job that took 6 months to complete at a cost of $1 million!), the John Canning Company, the group that performed the restoration, left one small 9×18-inch patch tainted.  That patch can be found near the crab’s claw in the hall’s northwest corner.  While most websites (and even Grand Central tour guides) claim that the dirt was caused by nicotine tar from the hundreds upon hundreds of commuters who puffed in the Concourse before cigarettes were banned, JCC disputes this fact, stating that the grime, which boasted a 2-inch thickness in some spots, was actually created by air pollutants, including car and truck exhaust and soot emissions from area industrial plants.  JCC left the small patch of dirt intact for future study.  According to the company’s website, such patches “provide the complete environmental history of the building’s interior.”

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Though the dirty ceiling patch was referenced in Arthur, it wasn’t shown.  A close-up view of it can be seen below, though.

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For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles.

Big THANK YOU to my friend/fellow stalker Owen, from the When Write Is Wrong blog, for showing me this location!  Smile

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Grand Central Terminal is located at 89 East 42nd Street in the Midtown East area of New York.  The Whispering Gallery, from Arthur, can be found just outside of the Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, which is on the Lower Level in the Dining Concourse.  The dirty ceiling patch is located near the crab’s claw in the northwest corner of the Main Concourse.

Grand Central Station

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Yet another Gossip Girl  filming location that I stalked a few weeks back while vacationing in Manhattan is the train station known as Grand Central Terminal.  But being that Grand Central has actually been featured in more than a few hundred productions since it first opened in 1913, it’s not really accurate to refer to the place simply as a “Gossip Girl filming location”.  Truth be told, being that the building is a National Historic Landmark and has been in operation for close to a century now, it’s really not fair to refer to the place as a “filming location” at all.  The fact that the station has been immortalized in countless films and television shows over the years is more of a side-note than anything else.  Truth be told, Grand Central Station, or Grand Central Terminal as it is officially called, is not only the largest train station in the entire world, but is also a marvel of modern-day architecture and one of the cornerstones of New York History.  The terminal, which boasts 44 platforms and 67 different tracks and covers over 48 acres of space!!!, first opened on February 2, 1913 after a staggering ten years of construction.  The Beaux-Arts style building was actually designed by two architectural firms – the firm of Reed & Stern handled the engineering, while Warren and Westmore conducted the aesthetic composition.  And the place truly is a site to behold!   The station’s main concourse is absolutely breathtaking – I mean my breath was literally taken away the first time I saw it!  Seeing the huge shafts of sunlight stream through the concourse’s many window panels, as Hal Morey captured so beautifully in this photograph, is something everyone should experience in person at least once in their lives. The main concourse’s Grand Staircase which is made of marble and which was modeled after the main staircase in the Paris Opera House, is flanked by three beautiful – and HUGE – 75-foot tall leaded glass windows (pictured above).

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On a side note – The Grand Staircase is also, coincidentally, where I took one of my very favorite photographs of New York (pictured above)!  LOL LOL LOL

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But my favorite part of the terminal’s main concourse has to be its ceiling!  Oh, the ceiling!  Grand Central’s beautiful, vaulted ceiling, which features a mural of  Zodiac signs painted backwards was designed and created in 1912 by artist Paul Helleu and contains over 2,500 stars which actually light up.  The reason for the backwards Zodiac depiction, you ask?   The mural is supposed to represent the view of the stars a god would see while looking down upon planet Earth through the heavens.

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The exterior of Grand Central Station is also quite remarkable, as you can see in the above photograph. 

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In 1914, while the station was under construction, French sculptor Jules-Alexis Coutans designed a 48 -foot tall statue of the Roman gods Minerva, Hercules, and Mercury which was to sit sentinel above Grand Central’s 42nd Street entrance.  The statue, which was carved by the John Donnelly Company, also boasts a central glass clock measuring a whopping 13 feet in circumference.  The clock was designed by none other than Tiffany & Co. and represents the largest example of Tiffany Glass in the entire world.

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At night, the exterior becomes even more spectacular. 

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As you can see in the above picture, Grand Central is usually bustling with commuters and visitors alike!  In fact, more than 500,000 people walk through the terminal’s doors EACH DAY!!!!  (No, that’s not a typo – I really meant EACH DAY!)  According to this fabulous article, in the year 1947 alone over 65 MILLION people visited Grand Central – an amount which equaled 40% of the entire popular of the United States at the time!

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Which makes it all the more amazing that the station’s doors were almost shuttered in the 1950s.   Due to the decline of railroads as a popular means of transportation, the terminal faced demolition on numerous different occasions beginning in the year 1954.  Thankfully all such plans were subsequently thwarted, until 1967 when Penn Central Railroad announced its plans to tear down Grand Central and replace it with a sixty-plus story office building.  Thankfully, New York preservationists, most notably former First Lady Jackie O., stepped in to stop the project.  Jackie’s efforts took her all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where a ten year battle was fought over the station.  Penn Central eventually lost the case and Grand Central was awarded landmark status, eliminating any further possibility of it ever being destroyed or changed. In 1994, the terminal was taken over by the Metro-North company, who subsequently began an extensive renovation process, restoring the terminal to her original glory to the tune of $250 million.  Today Grand Central is as beautiful, and as busy, as ever.  Besides being simply a commuter hub, today’s Grand Central Station also boasts fifty different retail stores and five different upscale restaurants, including the world-famous Oyster Bar which has been in operation since the station first opened in 1913.  And, of course, as I mentioned before, the terminal is also a frequent filming location!

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Grand Central has been featured in two different episodes of Gossip Girl – the Pilot episode and the Season Two episode entitled “Oh Brother, Where Bart Thou?”.  In the Pilot, It-girl Serena van der Woodsen is spotted at Grand Central while making her infamous return to New York after a year spent in a Connecticut boarding school.

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In that same episode, Rufus Humphrey picks up his kids, Dan and Jenny, at Grand Central after a weekend spent with their mother.

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And yet again in that very same episode, Grand Central’s famous Campbell Apartment Bar, which I have blogged about once before, shows up at the site of Nate and Serena’s illicit tryst.

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In the “Oh Brother, Where Bart Thou?” episode, Rufus confronts Lily about the child she never told him about while standing in the middle of Grand Central’s main concourse.

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The Campbell Apartment also shows up in that episode as the spot where Chuck Bass hires a private investigator to look into the background of his deceased father’s widow.

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Grand Central, as well as its flap-board destination sign, figure prominently in the end of fave teeny-bopper movie Just My Luck.

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Other movies that have filmed at the terminal include North By Northwest, Armageddon, Carlito’s Way, Hackers, I Am Legend, K-PAX, Men In Black and its sequel Men In Black II, Midnight Run, Old Dogs, Party Monster, Revolutionary Road, The Bone Collector, The Cotton Club, The Fisher King, One Fine Day, Conspiracy Theory, Midnight Run, Loser, Falling In Love, The Prince of Tides, The Freshman, The Perfect Score, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, and Unfaithful.  And, Grand Central replicas have even been built on studio soundstages when filming on location at the actual station wasn’t feasible, as was the case with Superman, Twentieth Century, Going Hollywood, The Thin Man Goes Home and Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

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On a “must-see” side note – One of Grand Central’s most famous spots, an area which I, sadly, have yet to visit, is the Whispering Gallery, which is located in the station’s Dining Concourse.  As the name suggests, thanks to the laws of physics and the Gallery’s domed ceiling, two friends can stand at opposite corners of the room, face the walls, and whisper to each other and those whispers will be carried, quite loudly, from one corner of the room to the other.  How amazingly cool is that?  Fellow stalker Owen has even tested out this marvel of science and says it really does work!  I absolutely cannot wait to try it out myself next year!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Grand Central Station is located on 42nd Street, in between Lexington and Park Avenues.  Docent-led tours of the station are given each Wednesday afternoon at 12:30 p.m. by the Municipal Arts Society.  The Whispering Gallery is located in the station’s Dining Concourse near the world-famous Oyster Bar.  The Campbell Apartment is located at 15 Vanderbilt Avenue, just off Grand Central’s main concourse area.  Sadly though, the bar has recently come under new ownership and the dress code has been changed.  And, for some incredibly odd reason, it seems no one on the Campbell Apartment staff knows exactly what the new dress code entails.  When we called the bar to inquire about the dress code prior to our arrival, we were told that jeans and tennis shoes were permissible. But when we showed up we were denied entrance . . . due to our jeans and tennis shoes.  LOL  Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind a place upholding a dress code, at all.  In fact, I quite like it.  But if you’re going to do so, the staff should darn well be able to tell patrons CORRECTLY what that dress code is!