In 1976, the terminal was declared a National Historical Landmark. Then, a calamitous fire in 1997 might have terminated the business, were the economy not in an upswing and business booming otherwise. When the automobile pushed trains out of favor, plans to demolish the terminal for high-rise office buildings were only stopped by advocacy from former lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. A fun one for the kids, if not the kid in you: the front archway is a whispering galley, so that a word spoken on one end, however soft, can be heard 20 yards away at the other end.įor all its charm, the storied establishment has seen dark days. The 440-seat restaurant is trisected into a large dining room to the left of the entrance, a snaking lunch counter and elevated oyster bar to the right, suited for solo dining, quick meals or both and a New England-style saloon beyond that, complete with dark wood, model boats, and wall-mounted fish. With red-checkered tablecloths, swiveling diner chairs, and paper-hatted servers, you may forget what year it is altogether. Warm terracotta tiles hug the restaurant’s dramatic, vaulted ceilings, relieving some of the weight of the countless tons of cold concrete above. Renowned architect Rafael Guastavino’s design of the subterranean space is timeless. The huge number of travelers on the long-distance trains of the era made a stylish oyster bar within a rail hub an ideal match. Oysters from the mouth of the Hudson were still edible at that point, and oyster shacks were a feature of lower Manhattan. That the restaurant debuted nearly in tandem with the now-iconic transportation hub tells of how different New York City was in 1913. The underground, century-old Grand Central Oyster Bar in the deep innards of the marvelous Grand Central Station, however, may be the one exception.
Eating nearly anything within New York City’s reviled transit system is far from a dazzling experience.
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