Streetscapes / Grand Central Terminal; The 23-Story, Beaux-Arts 1913 Tower That Wasn't
WHILE the city is celebrating the completed restoration of Grand Central Terminal, one large element of the original design is still missing -- a 23-story Beaux-Arts-style office tower directly above the concourse. The tower was never built, but it casts a shadow over the 1913 rail terminal and the surrounding area.
The idea for a tower in connection with the terminal traces its origins to the turn of the century, when William J. Wilgus, chief engineer and soon to be vice president of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, conceived plan for rebuilding the huge rail yard that was north of Grand Central to permit the construction of steel-framed buildings overhead. ''Thus from the air would be taken wealth,'' he wrote in a memoir published in Transactions, the journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, in 1940.
In 1903, several architects submitted proposals for a new terminal, and most of them used a monumental tower over the terminal itself as their centerpiece. The winning design, by Charles Reed & Allen Stem, proposed a single 24-story Renaissance-style building that would include the terminal. It looked something like the Plaza Hotel.
The architects Warren & Wetmore were brought in to work with Reed & Stem, and it appears that Warren & Wetmore's influence shifted the terminal's design to its final Beaux-Arts state.
When the nearly complete plans were published in early 1910, the terminal looked much like what was eventually built, with three significant differences. First, there was a giant curved skylight over the concourse. Second, Park Avenue from 45th to 48th Streets was projected as a grand court of honor, with matching colonnaded buildings housing the National Academy of Design and the Metropolitan Opera. The third difference was a 23-story Beaux-Arts-style office tower above the concourse, set back about 100 feet from 42d Street.
This 219- by 294-foot tower was shaped like a rectangular doughnut, only 49 feet deep on each side, with elevator access from the existing lobbies at the four corners of the terminal; the concourse's east stairway, not constructed until the current restoration, was part of the plan for the office tower.
In December 1912, a month before the new terminal opened, the first solid hint that the tower was far in the future was published. Outlook magazine printed a revised rendering of the concourse interior, without any east stairway. But no journal reported directly on the failure to build the tower.
Wilgus's 1940 memoir said only that it ''fell by the wayside'' and might still be built. Perhaps the railroad was preoccupied with the continued stream of new hotels, apartment houses and office buildings that went up in the 1910's and 1920's north of the terminal on Park Avenue.
After World War II the railroad began looking for ways to increase its income, and in 1954 the architects Fellheimer & Wagner announced a 50-story tower that would completely replace Grand Central Terminal. It was slick and angular and included a 2,400-car garage.
Almost simultaneously, the developer William Zeckendorf said that the architect I. M. Pei had developed a competing 80-story design with an observation tower so tall it would be higher than the Empire State Building. No plans for this tower were published, and Mr. Pei said recently that he had no recollection of the design.
PUBLIC protest followed, led by the magazine Architectural Forum, and in 1955 Emery Roth & Sons published a design for a tower that did not encroach on the station. The result, the Pan Am Building (now the Met Life Building) went up in 1962.
In the 1960's Penn Central, the successor owner, proposed a blocky tower over Grand Central, designed by Marcel Breuer, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission declined to grant permission, sparking a lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court. The Court's 1978 decision, upholding the commission's authority, was a watershed for the preservation movement.
In 1980 the architects Gruzen & Partners studied the revival of the original 1910 tower design. They found many problems, including changed building codes, loss of corner space to the elevator cores and the huge difficulties of delivering materials and planning construction.
The current restoration was undertaken by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which has leased Grand Central from its current owner, American Premier Underwriters of Cincinnati. Tom Kelly, an M.T.A. spokesman, said that the lease did not expire until 2141 and that there was an option to buy in 2019. An important element of the lease is that American Premier cannot use Grand Central's development rights over the terminal itself.
That could leave those rights -- 1.5 million square feet -- floating around midtown for more than the next century, in an area so crowded that sites to which the rights might be transferred are difficult to find. The ''wealth'' that Wilgus originally saw over Grand Central is still up in the air -- waiting to land.