Midtown: The City in the Sky

Grand Central Terminal

The celestial ceiling above the Main Concourse, the Whispering Gallery, and the busiest train terminal in the Western Hemisphere.

You're standing in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal, and the first thing to do is look up. That vaulted ceiling above you is a backwards map of the winter sky: 2,500 stars in gold leaf on turquoise, painted in 1913 and copied onto new panels in 1945 after water and grime wrecked the original. See the small dark patch near Cancer the crab, up to your right? That's the one square the restorers left untouched in 1998, so you can see what decades of smoke and soot did to the whole ceiling. Now walk toward the information booth with the four-faced clock at the center of the room.

Everyone in New York has met someone under this clock. From here, head to the ramp that slopes down toward the Oyster Bar. Stand in one corner of the arched underpass and face the wall. Speak softly.

Someone in the diagonal corner will hear you as clearly as if you were standing beside them. The curved Guastavino tile makes a perfect sound channel. When you're ready, head back to the Main Concourse and exit through the southern doors onto 42nd Street. Turn right and walk west toward Fifth Avenue.

New York Public Library Main Branch

Patience and Fortitude, the marble lions, guard the Beaux-Arts palace of the city's books, 390 feet of marble along Fifth Avenue.

You're facing the main entrance of the New York Public Library, and those two marble lions flanking the stairs have names: Patience on the left, Fortitude on the right. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia gave them those names during the Great Depression: he said New Yorkers would need both qualities to get through. The lions have worn holiday wreaths, baseball caps after Yankees championships, and, in 2021, giant face masks. Walk up the stairs and step inside the Astor Hall lobby, if the doors are open.

The marble here runs three feet thick through the entire building. Above you, the Rose Main Reading Room stretches nearly the length of a football field under a ceiling painted with clouds, but it's only open to visitors during the 10 to 11 AM hour and on the brief third-floor tour. If you miss it, the McGraw Rotunda on the third floor still gives you the murals and the scale. When you step back outside, walk around to the rear of the building.

That's Bryant Park, your next stop. Under your feet, right now, is something strange: a two-level underground storage facility that holds four million books, with a conveyor belt that runs from the park back into the library.

Bryant Park

A French-style garden with movable green chairs, a winter ice rink, and four million books stored beneath your feet.

You're in Bryant Park, and the green chairs you see scattered across the gravel and the lawn are a New York trademark. No one locks them down. Grab one, drag it wherever you want, and sit. The park wasn't always like this.

By the 1970s it was a drug market people crossed the street to avoid. A complete redesign in 1992 turned it into what you see now: a formal French garden framed by London plane trees, with the back of the library rising like a cliff on the east side. In winter the lawn becomes the city's only free-admission ice rink. In summer the HBO summer film festival packs the grass at dusk.

Walk toward the center fountain, then look back at the library's rear facade. Those thin vertical windows are actually doorways. The architects planned for the library stacks to expand outward into the park someday, and the doors were built in advance. The expansion never happened above ground.

It happened below. When you're ready, exit the park on the Sixth Avenue side at 42nd Street and turn right. Walk two blocks west to Broadway.