“But Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Mike said, “didn’t he make all his millions in steamboats?”
“The commodore, now there’s a man for you,” Ledger said. “Started life as a poor farm boy on Staten Island, descended from a Dutchman who came to America as an indentured servant. By the age of sixteen he had bought himself a flat-bottomed boat and was rowing people back and forth across the harbor to Manhattan. Just a kid with a long oar and a dream to make a buck. Twenty years later, he’d pocketed enough money to build his own steamboat.”
“When did he switch his interest to trains?”
“Began investing in them in the eighteen forties. While the Hudson River froze over in wintertime and steamboats couldn’t get to Albany, railroad trains could deliver their passengers practically on time. Twenty years later, Vanderbilt owned two lines in Manhattan with separate terminals and finally became president of a third line—the most powerful, New York Central—which is when he decided to merge them into a single building.”
“On this site?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. The commodore spent more than one hundred million dollars of his own money to pay for the depot, buying up all the land around. A real visionary. He saw the railroads as the future.”
“What became of the original station downtown?” Mike asked.
“Vanderbilt sold it to a fellow named P. T. Barnum. Heard of him?” Ledger said. “Remade it into the Hippodrome, for the circus and all his other spectacles. Till it became the first Madison Square Garden.”
“Where Harry Thaw murdered the great architect Stanford White,” Mike said, “over the girl on the red velvet swing.”
“I guess you guys see murder in everything.”
“Afraid I do, Mr. Ledger,” Mike said.
“Cornelius Vanderbilt came to understand that railroads were changing the face of America. Before the Civil War, we were an agrarian nation. We grew things, and we moved them around on horse carriages or by ships. It took five days to cross New Jersey by the Morris Canal in those days, from the Delaware River to the Hudson. Trains came along? It became a five-hour trip.”
“Moving people and freight at a new speed and efficiency.”
“Moving ideas, too. I think of the trains as the computer technology of their time,” Ledger said. “Now Vanderbilt’s station opened in 1871, so keep in mind, because 42nd Street then was in the middle of nowhere, you still had to shuttle people on streetcars and horse-drawn carriages from 42nd Street to downtown. It was pretty much a mess up here at the depot, even though his ownership of the train lines—and all the real estate—paid off. When the commodore died in 1877, he had a fortune greater than all the money in the US Treasury. And just as he passed away, a blizzard shattered the glass roof of his train station.”
“Time for a new plan, I guess.”
“But it didn’t happen quite yet, nor for that reason,” Ledger said. “Not till 1902. Just like today, there were only four tracks carrying trains down through the spine of Manhattan, even though there were sixteen million passengers a year by then.
“One January morning, a new engineer was making his first run piloting a passenger train—the local one-eighteen from White Plains. It was snowing out, the kind of thing that made the Park Avenue trenches especially murky, weather that left steam and vapors hanging in the air. The driver was speeding a bit, trying to make up for time lost on the route. Claims he never saw the train ahead of him—the Danbury express—that was parked on the same track, right up at 56th Street, waiting for a signal from the station to pull on in.”
“People died?” I asked.
“Fifteen. Most ever, to this day, in a train accident in Manhattan. The way the steam hissed and the smoke bellowed, the rest of the injured thought they’d be cooked alive,” Ledger said. “‘Harvest of death’—that’s what a reporter called it. A harvest of death under New York City streets. That’s why this building’s an accidental terminal.”
“Accidental?”
“Got built, Ms. Cooper, because of that accident. Your colleagues indicted the engineer for manslaughter. The very next year, the plans for this building began. When the terminal opened in 1913, Grand Central was the highest-value piece of property in New York City. And then the entire center of gravity began to shift to this neighborhood. It’s this colossus of a train station that made this part of the city ‘Midtown.’”
“So tell us about crime, Don,” Mike said. “You can’t have an attraction like this without bringing in all kinds of crime. You must know stories that never reach the street.”
“I can’t think of any murders, till this one today. There’ve been robberies over the years, of course. But that could happen anywhere, mind you. And the stuff that you do, Ms. Cooper,” Ledger said, twirling the end of his mustache, reluctant like many others of his generation to use the word “rape.” “When the terminal was at its lowest ebb, back in the eighties, we had some bad cases out of here.”
I remembered as a young prosecutor when one of my colleagues had handled a case of a man who waited in prey for tourists getting off trains, offering to help them with luggage and taking them instead to remote platforms where he sexually assaulted them.
“Those crimes happen much more frequently in subway stations,” I said, respecting the man’s great pride in his terminal. We’d had cases that took place on moving trains, in deserted cars, as well as on platforms late at night when women alone were easy targets.
“What else, Don?” Mike asked.
“Over the years we’ve had more than our share of ransom demands. Are you old enough to remember when there used to be banks of lockers in the terminal?”
We all nodded. In one of my favorite novels, The Catcher in the Rye, the character named Holden Caulfield stored his belongings in one of the coin-operated lockers while he slept on a waiting-room bench.
“Used to be you could rent one for hours or days to store your things in. So the lockers were often designated drop spots in kidnappings. But that all changed after 9/11. No more temporary storage. You know about that better than I do. And mail train robberies. Looking back on things, we sure had a lot of those.”
“Of course,” Mike said.
“One day it’s a funeral cortege with some head of state, or war heroes shipping out, or kids going off to college or a summer vacation,” Ledger said. “Next thing you know it’s a Code Black.”
“Code Black?”
Don Ledger looked to Bruce Gleeson before he answered. “That’s what the emergency system is called for our stationmasters.”
“What system?” Mike said.
“Well, for terrorists and things like that.”
“Tell me.”
“Go ahead, Don,” Gleeson said. “It’s okay.”
“From the stationmaster’s office and several other locations in the terminal, there are surveillance cameras that can zoom in on any part of the building—theoretically—if they’re alerted to a problem.”
“Theoretically,” Mike said. “If there isn’t any visual obstruction—pillar, staircase, ticket booth.”
“Best we can do, Detective. This lets them direct emergency responders to the exact spot, as well as shut down exhaust fans to stop the spread of contaminants.”
“We’ll need to see this equipment,” Mike said, straightening up and brushing back his hair with his hand. “Make sure it’s working. You’ve had a terrorist bomb in here before.”
Gleeson looked quizzically at Mike. He seemed as surprised to hear the news as I did.
Don Ledger nodded. “Way before your time. All of you.”
“A cop died,” Mike said. “Back when my father was on the job. 1976. You grow up in a blue household, you hear those stories instead of fairy tales.”
“Terrorists?” I asked. “1976?”
“The Croatian National Resistance. Wanted to be freed from Yugoslavian control. A group of them hijacked a TWA flight from New York, bound for Chicago. Made their demands and got a plane full of passengers to
Paris.”
I didn’t know the story at all.
“And the threat,” Ledger said, “was a bomb in a locker.”
“Here?” I asked.
“A locker right here in the belly of Grand Central Terminal. Could have taken out half of the five-fifteen to Greenwich.”
“So the negotiators met the demands of the terrorists,” Mike said, “who told them exactly where the bomb was. The Bomb Squad retrieved it and took it to be detonated at Rodman’s Neck.”
The NYPD Firing Range in the Bronx was a training ground where officers learned to shoot for operations, including the emergency response on September 11, 2001, and—in a large crater on the southernmost tip of the neck of land that juts out into Eastchester Bay—the place where the elite Bomb Squad took deadly explosives to be detonated. The Pit, as the crater was called, was the spot in which the bombs were rendered harmless. From crude to sophisticated devices, they’d been the handiwork of every radical group from the Weathermen to the Black Panthers to George Metesky—the Mad Bomber—and even Al-Qaeda.
“Only thing wrong was that when the squad tried to detonate the device by remote control, it didn’t go off. So a young cop named Brian Murray was sent out to the Pit to find the problem,” Mike said. “The damn thing exploded and killed him.”
No one spoke.
“RIP,” Mike said.
“I get your point, Detective,” Bruce Gleeson said. “I got the call this evening, and I assumed we had a sexual predator on the prowl. You think it’s bigger than that.”
“I think you can’t make any assumptions. Transportation hubs are a natural target for terrorists. They’ve been here before, and someday they’re going to be back.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“That’s the very place I made my movie debut, Ms. Cooper,” Ledger said.
It was after 8:00 P.M. on Thursday evening, and Mike had asked Ledger and Gleeson to take us through some of the physical plant, to explain to us the size and scope of the terminal. It was a good time to do it, with rush hour crowds already dispersed to their homes.
“Maybe that’s why you look so familiar to me,” I said, smiling back at him.
“You think I’m kidding, do you? Are you a Hitchcock fan?”
“My favorite.”
“North by Northwest? It was the first movie ever shot in Grand Central. 1959. My boss wanted a walk-on in a frame with Cary Grant, who was jumping on the Twentieth Century ’cause he was suspected of murder, so I tagged along in the shot.”
We were standing at the iconic information booth, which was crowned by an opalescent four-faced Seth Thomas clock, a priceless golden ball that had kept perfect time for a century.
“Good flick. Almost makes sleeping in the sleeping car of a train look sexy,” Mike said. “What are we looking at, Don?”
“The main concourse, all thirty-six thousand square feet of it. Larger than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral.”
I remember, as a kid, thinking this was the largest indoor space I’d ever seen. That still held true.
“Nowhere to hide out here,” Mike said. “Wide-open.”
The room was enormous, with only the round information booth obstructing its center. The south side of the great hall, broken by the walkway to the old waiting room, was lined with ticket booths, most closed for the evening. Each one of them—if breached—could be a cubbyhole for someone looking to do evil.
The departure gates covered the north side.
“Yeah, but those gates are the portals to the unknown,” Mercer said, waving his arm across the length of that quarter of the room, a gaping mouth full of tunnels that led under- and aboveground to all of Manhattan.
We could see up the staircase on the west to the doors fronting Vanderbilt Avenue. The eastern end was much more troublesome. The staircase there, replicated in the restoration of the terminal, despite its grandeur, was a dead end, leading up to an Apple store that was one of the biggest revenue sources for the building. No exit.
But on either side of the staircases there were wide archways, one framing the entrance to the subway station and the other to an arcade of shops and services, then eventually to Lexington Avenue. Between the two sets of stairs was another one down to the lower concourse.
“Portals to the unknown kind of nails it, Detective,” Ledger said. “This terminal and its train yards actually cover seventy acres of territory.”
“What?” Mike said.
“That’s the amount of land that Vanderbilt and his successors bought up. Penn Station? That’s got less than thirty acres. We go on forever, or so it seems. We control track up to 97th Street, all buried now under Park Avenue. Try keeping your eye on that.”
“And below us? Is there something under the lower concourse? What’s the secret basement you mentioned?”
“The levels beneath are the deepest in New York City. Think of a ten-story office building turned upside down. We’re talking the underbelly of Manhattan.”
“Isn’t there a new subway coming in?” Mercer asked.
“Yes, the Long Island Railroad is building a link that will land even deeper. Sixteen stories down, not ready till 2019.”
“But digging right now?”
“Absolutely.”
“So there are men down there, connected to this terminal?”
“Every day. Hundreds of men working on that. It will enable another eighty thousand folks to come through here, from Long Island, without them having to go to Penn Station like they do now,” Ledger said. Penn Station was Amtrak’s facility on the west side.
“So when trains ‘terminate’ here,” I said, “how does that work? Where do they go if they don’t just pass through to the next stop, like all the other stations?”
Ledger told us. “They’re backed out onto another track, which takes them to a wheelhouse, where they turn around, make a complete loop underneath the terminal, and then get set up for the trip out.”
“And a wheelhouse is . . . ?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. The trains pull out and go around—used to be called a ‘roundhouse’—on a circular track underneath the building, and come back facing north again, for the next ride.”
Mike’s eyes were scanning the room, now staring up at the zodiac figures on the celestial ceiling, until he shifted his gaze to the many-storied arched windows that stretched for the length of a football field above the concourse.
“Talk access up there,” he said. “What’s all that glass?”
I took several steps back to lean against the information counter and look up.
“Windows, Detective.”
“I know that, Don. But there’s a helluva lot of them.”
“When the terminal was built, there was only one way to ventilate it. Fresh air.”
“You mean that those things open and close?”
On either end of the concourse, east and west, were three gigantic windows, hundreds of feet overhead. I don’t think I had ever seen bays of windows as large as these.
“Had to be that way a hundred years ago. Light didn’t come from anywhere else but the street. It was the primitive days of electricity, so lighting the terminal was a daunting task. Not a bad place to hide up top, if you don’t get vertigo.”
“Hide? It’s all glass.”
“A bit of an illusion, Detective Chapman. Those are actually catwalks up there. Glass boxes, if you will.”
I strained to see what Ledger was talking about.
“So there’s one layer of glass, the windows that open over Lexington Avenue, many flights up, of course. Then there’s actually a walkway, made entirely of glass brick, which runs across the entire width of the building. Look down through it and you’d think you’re about to fall twenty stories to the terminal floor.”
I got queasy even listening to the description.
“But nowhere to hide,” I said, squinting to look up at the glass panes.
“You’d be wrong about that,” Ledger said. “The second long pane of glass
faces the interior, over the concourse. Those windows open, too. So natural air flowed through, as well as a great amount of light. But see those pillars in between each of the arched windows?”
The pillars extended from the top of the staircases on either end of the building up to the arch where the vaulted ceiling rose over the concourse.
“Sure,” Mercer said.
“The catwalks go clear from one side of the building to the other. Easy to hide a small posse behind those pillars. Give you a bird’s-eye view of the entire floor, if your stomach doesn’t get butterflies from standing up there.”
“Butterflies?” Mike asked.
“Standing on a piece of glass in the sky? I never liked it much. One of the architects walked me through ages ago. I got kind of nervous midway out when I made the mistake of looking down. ‘Form following function,’ he kept saying, to move me along. ‘All done for a plan, Don. Air and light. Now just keep walking.’” Ledger imitated the man’s Southern accent, laughing at himself as he talked.
“But what do they connect? Why are they there, and how would one get up inside them?”
“Used to be several offices in the corners at the top, just beyond the windows. One end with desks for the station managers, another in which the engineers had a lounge. They could catch up on their sleep on cots. I don’t think anything up there is used much these days, since the big renovation. It’s too remote to be practical now.”
“Getting there?” Mercer repeated.
Ledger had to think. “You need a key, any way you look at it. That situation room you were all just in?”
“The imaginary seventh floor, the one that’s twenty flights up,” Mike said. “Those dark, snaky hallways leading to it?”
“Yes. You can climb down to the catwalks from the situation room. And there’s a stairwell that goes from landing to landing, but it’s kept locked on every level, too.”
“Add it to tomorrow’s list,” Mike said.
I took a few steps forward to turn around and look at the glass-enclosed, glass-bottomed catwalks on the other end of the terminal. A woman racing for a midevening train bumped against me hard and practically spun me around.
Terminal City Page 19
