Terminal City (Alex Cooper)

by Linda Fairstein

  “Sixty years?” Mercer said. “Hats off, sir.”

  “You do what you love, Mr. Wallace. If you’re fortunate, that is.”

  “Amen to that. Would you mind sitting down and letting us ask you some questions about the terminal?”

  Ledger was shorter than I, with a slim build and a headful of white hair. He wore hearing aids and had reading glasses in the pocket of his work shirt, and I doubted that his teeth were his own. But he was warm and good-natured, eager to help us get a picture of Grand Central.

  “Happy to try,” Ledger said, taking a seat.

  Mike looked over his shoulder at Bruce Gleeson. “Were you able to come up with a blueprint of the place for us?”

  “Not yet.” Gleeson winced. “The building was completely renovated more than a decade ago. There are a good number of interior structural changes that won’t be accounted for in the original plans. But we should have copies for you to work from by morning.”

  “You mean there have been changes big enough to make a difference in looking for people who are inside the joint?” Mike asked.

  “Oh, yeah. There were entire walls taken down; there were staircases constructed. The one on the concourse that leads up to the Apple store? That didn’t exist until a decade ago. It was part of the original plan but it wasn’t built till the terminal was restored. The original builders ran short on money for the Italian marble, so the blueprints will only get you so far,” Ledger said, poking his finger to the side of his head. “You got a few of us with institutional memory.”

  “Good. Let’s get started now, but then we’ll meet you back here at eight A.M.,” Mike said. “You hang with us for a few days, okay?”

  “If Mr. Gleeson frees me up to assist you, I’ll be here.”

  “Anything the police need, Ledger. That’s what you’ll be doing.”

  “Thanks to you both,” Mike said. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tomorrow the three of us—Mercer, Coop, and I—will start the day here. The commissioner will undoubtedly have teams saturating the station. Feds, too. First, Don, it would help if you give us some background. Help us figure how to get to know this place. We’ll be tripping all over one another if we don’t know half of what you do.”

  Ledger leaned back in his chair and twisted the end of his white mustache. “That could take most of the night.”

  Mike pulled his chair closer in to make his point. “We may not have that many hours, Don. Give us what we need to know.”

  Ledger wagged his finger and practically put his nose against Mike’s. “You’ve got a colossus here, young man. One hundred years old and full of secrets. If you all don’t know what you’re looking for inside her walls, then how in hell can I pick out what’s important? I’d prefer to start at the get-go, run through it as fast as I can, then let you gents decide for yourselves.”

  “Secrets?” Mike said, half grinning at the old man’s choice of words.

  “Dead serious, young man. Don’t mock me. There’s basements you won’t find on any floor plan, hidden staircases, isolated platforms for dignitaries, and enough mystery down below us that Hitler thought he could change the course of World War Two by penetrating Grand Central.”

  Don Ledger had me when he uttered the words “secrets” and “hidden.”

  “You’re in charge, sir.”

  Mercer handed me an extra steno pad, and Ledger got to work.

  “The first rail line in New York City was laid in 1831, from Prince Street to Union Square. Until that time, steamboats ran passengers and freight up and down the Hudson, so no trains were allowed to operate on the west side of town near the river, as a matter of law.”

  “Weren’t allowed to compete with maritime traffic?” Mercer asked.

  “That’s right. It was such a primitive business that the first iron rails were shipped over from England—not even made here. And the man who owned the train line was Thomas Emmet. He had a younger brother you might have heard of named Robert.”

  Mike smiled. “The great Irish revolutionary, executed for high treason for plotting a rebellion against the British. One of my mother’s heroes. And all the time his brother a wealthy entrepreneur over here? I never knew that.”

  “The population of Manhattan was centered downtown then, as you probably know.”

  The island had been settled at its southern tip, at the Battery, and had slowly moved northward with the influx of European immigrants.

  Ledger went on. “By 1851, when there were several rail lines—the New York and Harlem, the Albany, the New Haven—the builders had finally blasted through rocks to lay rails up to Yorkville and later extended them through Harlem and across the river into the Bronx. A year after that, a New Yorker could travel by train from City Hall to Albany.

  “But because the steam locomotives were so dangerous—starting fires, running over horses and people who dared cross the tracks to get to the other side of the street—they weren’t allowed to operate below 42nd Street.”

  “So how did people get uptown, no less to Albany, from City Hall?” I asked.

  “The depot that was built on this site was the end of the rail. It was horse-drawn carriages that took folk from here downtown. Part old-fashioned and the other part newfangled.”

  “Think of it,” Mercer said, “it’s these railroads that created suburbs outside the city. Gave men the ability to live up in Westchester or Connecticut with their families but travel into Manhattan every day. It’s literally what made commuting possible.”

  “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 i
n 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?”

&
nbsp; “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.”