A generation later, Belle, still at it, credits Stangl as “the godfather of this project; he was the best thing that an architect needed—a patron.” The joint partnership of public and private works produced a Grand Central—one that is serving a very different constituency in a very different city than when it opened a century ago—that is even grander than the original. The redevelopment generated millions of dollars in rentals to defray the costs of maintenance. Working from a cache of architectural renderings discovered by accident in the terminal’s southeast tower, Belle and his colleagues, including Frank J. Prial Jr. and Maxinne Leighton, painstakingly chronicled the terminal’s embryonic beginnings and adapted them to meet the metamorphosis from the nation’s premier long-haul passenger depot to America’s biggest and busiest commuter terminal. The architects meticulously catalogued the peeling and cracked plaster, the chipped and spalled marble, the stained artificial Caen stone panels and “ad hoc commercial accretions—retail and advertising signs, for example—which are inconsistent with the terminal’s original architectural dignity.”

In April 1990, Metro-North announced a $425 million master revitalization plan conceived by Beyer Blinder Belle and intended to transform Grand Central into, as Stangl described it, “a destination in its own right.” With the Metropolitan Transportation Authority perennially strapped for funds, the renovation budget was quickly pared, to about $240 million. But through creative accounting by visionary bureaucrats and a bond issue backed by retail revenue, the full $400 million and more (actually, closer to $800 million, including repairs, new passageways, and platforms, utilities, and other improvements) has been spent since 1983 on enhancing and ennobling Grand Central. “We figured out a scheme that allowed us to buy a building losing a fortune,” Susan Fine remembered, and ultimately redeemed “the value of public entrepreneurship—taking risks beyond the MTA’s core mission and trusting staff to get it done.”

As they embarked on the renovation, the Beyer Blinder Belle architects and historians declared, “The many functions and services of Grand Central Terminal and its brilliant architectural and urbanistic design form a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Good architecture, as defined by Vitruvius, integrates ‘commodity, firmness, and delight.’ In its extraordinary balance between usefulness, endurance and beauty, Grand Central emerges, on the brink of the 21st century, as a triumph of architecture.”

The deal depended, though, on who controlled the terminal. “The key initial obstacle to the Grand Central master plan is getting clear title to the building,” said Fred Harris, the MTA’s director of real estate. That obstacle was overcome in 1993 when the Penn Central Corporation of Cincinnati extended from 60 to 110 years its lease with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its Metro-North division. The MTA agreed to pay Penn Central $2.4 million annually—up from $377,000—a relatively low sum, except that the state authority also assumed liability for known environmental hazards in the train yards and along the right-of-way.

DETAIL OF THE ORNATELY CAPPED LUNETTE WINDOWS 125 FEET ABOVE THE FLOOR OF THE MAIN CONCOURSE.

The long-term lease meant that plans could proceed for a restoration of the transcendental ceiling, installation of an awe-inspiring staircase to the East Balcony matching the one on the west, increasing retail space to 155,000 square feet from 105,000 square feet, creating a 43rd Street Passage into the terminal from Lexington Avenue, between the Grand Hyatt Hotel and the Graybar Building, and removing office space that had been crammed in above the ramps to the Oyster Bar.

FIVE CHANDELIERS FESTOONED WITH BARE BULBS HANG FROM THE CEILING OF THE OLD WAITING ROOM, NOW VANDERBILT HALL.

The lease included another vital proviso to a public investment in the reconstruction project: Penn Central relinquished any right to develop the air space over the landmark, to demolish the 42nd Street façade, or to drive columns through the Vanderbilt Hall waiting room on the terminal’s south side. The MTA negotiated an agreement with LaSalle Partners Inc. and William Jackson Ewing to implement the revitalization, which Jennifer Raab, then the chairwoman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, described as “not just a cosmetic plan, although it will have great cosmetic impact.”

CONSTRUCTION BEGAN IN 1996 with the nearly $5 million restoration of the barrel-vaulted constellation-dappled ceiling over the Main Concourse. The original, with its 2,500 stars, 10 major constellations, and zodiacal signs, had been conceived by Whitney Warren and painted with tempera onto the plaster. Less than a decade later, it began to deteriorate. In 1944–45, it was scraped, four-by-eight-foot asbestos and cement Flexboards were attached to the steel-truss ceiling with 600 galvanized iron wires, and the mural was repainted by Charles Gulbrandsen. By the early 1990s, art historians concluded, the ceiling was “but a shadow of its past glory”—peeling, darkened by pollution, and punctuated by a five-inch-wide hole.

To clean and restore the ceiling without interrupting the flow of 500,000 people below required a 120-ton aluminum Erector set that could inch along tracks at the top of the scaffold and just below the terminal’s attic. “It didn’t take rocket science or Euclidean deduction,” John Belle said, but it did take innovative engineering and perseverance and a mammoth polyester shroud. “We want to be as invisible as we can be, without our workers looking down or commuters looking up,” said Steven H. Sommer, vice president of Lehrer McGovern Bovis, the primary contractor for the restoration. For nine months, restorers armed with cheesecloth and Simple Green dabbed decades of dirt away, revealing the universe. The grime was thought to be the eight decades’ accumulation of soot and diesel fumes, but on closer examination it was determined to be tar that had wafted sky-high from the billions of cigarettes puffed by passengers passing through the terminal. Beneath the filth, the sky was in such good shape that only five gallons of paint were needed to restore it.

To clean decades of dirt off the walls, they were painted with plastic. When it was pulled off, the grime came with it. The floor was less problematic. In four or so predawn hours every day, the restoration architects wrote, “all temporal vestiges are swept away and the great floor becomes a lake of smooth stone under a sky of gilt stars. Perhaps this is why the Main Concourse endures so memorably—not in its architectural eccentricities or complexity—but in its tenacious capacity to bear the brunt of change through changing times.” John Belle summed it up more succinctly: “It makes you feel like Fred Astaire. You just glide over it.” The rest of the oak benches were removed from the Main Waiting Room, which was converted into Vanderbilt Hall, a public exhibition and special event space (you can still feel furrows in the floor where waiting passengers shuffled their feet).

The restoration was so widely applauded that architecture critics ran short of superlatives and metaphors. In 1996 in the Times, Herbert Muschamp described the looming transformation as a “sex change” for “New York’s most cherished landmark”—one that embodied “architectural gender-bending”: “Most people recognize that the workplace has been altered by the changing status of women. The city, in effect, is one big workplace. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find similar alterations taking place on an urban scale. Grand Central was built 83 years ago as a temple to the manly cult of work: hustle, bustle, button-down collar, the high-powered rhythm of the 9 to 5. It will reemerge as a shrine to rituals traditionally associated with domesticity: dining, shopping and keeping up the house.”

The restored terminal was rededicated on October 1, 1998, just in time for a gubernatorial election, but before the renovation was fully complete (work on the finishing touches extended well into the 21st century). While dismissing the “gargantuanism” of the Metropolitan Life Building and the “vulgarity” of the Grand Hyatt, the New Yorker gushed that John Belle and the MTA, by transforming the terminal from a “covered version of Times Square,” had “managed the trick of making Grand Central look virginal while making it more commercial.”

Improvements are still being made, including a centennial corridor to honor Jacqueline Onassis and other heroes of the preservation campaign. Metro-North is transforming Grand Central into a terminal that fulfills a 21st-century mission. Passengers typically don’t wait for hours any more for trains to depart. They no longer arrive bedraggled from an overnight train ride in need of a shave or a steam bath. The new terminal would be brighter, freer, with less segregation between short- and long-haul passengers—in short, more egalitarian. “We democratized it,” Belle said. “Your train to New Haven or to Poughkeepsie became just as important as the 20th Century Limited.” Belle admitted, though, to one personal regret about a bygone era: “I would have loved to be in Grand Central when they rolled out the red carpet,” he said.