Grand Central Terminal was once the greatest train station in the world. Grand Central Terminal was built for Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad and completed in 1913, a Beaux-Arts palace of Indiana limestone whose main concourse ceiling, painted cerulean blue and studded with 2,500 constellations, vaults 125 feet above the floor. At its peak in 1947, more than 65 million people passed through annually.
By the 1960s, dwindling rail traffic led the Pennsylvania Railroad to demolish its own comparable station a few blocks west, and the Vanderbilt family proposed to do the same here, with a fifty-five-story skyscraper rising from the terminal's roof. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis led the campaign to save it, testifying before Congress and rallying public opinion. The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Penn Central case of 1978 that historic preservation did not constitute an illegal taking of private property.
Go into the main concourse, stand in the center, and look up at those stars. The whispering gallery in the lower dining concourse is there too: two people at opposite corners can hear each other whisper across the vaulted ceiling.