February 2, 1913: Grand Central Terminal Opens

February 2, 1913: Grand Central Terminal opens in Midtown Manhattan, at 42nd Street and Park Avenue. It replaces the former Grand Central Depot on the site, which had been in place since 1871.

Ever since, people have called it "Grand Central Station," but this is incorrect: It has always been officially named "Grand Central Terminal."

It became home to the New York Central Railroad, including its New York-to-Chicago train, the Twentieth Century Limited. It also became home to the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad.

The New York Central tracks running under Park Avenue, including 49th Street, allowed for special access from track level to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which opened in 1931. (The previous hotel by that name, at 34th Street and 5th Avenue, was torn down to make way for the Empire State Building, also opening in 1931.) From 1933 to 1945, this enabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt to take the New York Central from his hometown of Hyde Park, New York to Grand Central, and to be moved from the station to the hotel without the general public seeing his disability.

Grand Central became a major intercity conduit, and also a major commuter center, as it not only took people who lived in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut to their workplaces in Manhattan, but also served as an important subway junction, as the IRT's Lexington Avenue Line (today's 4, 5 and 6 Trains) and its Flushing Line (today's 7 Train) intersect there. A shuttle (now an S Train) connected the terminal with Times Square, 4 blocks to the west (Park Avenue to Madison, to 5th, to 6th, to 7th).

In 1963, the 808-foot Pan Am Building opened, between the station and the old New York Central Building. It was not popular: If anything, it was considered "too modern." In 1992, Pan American Airways went out of business, and the skyscraper became the MetLife Building. The New York Central Building, which opened in 1929, was renamed the New York General Building in 1958 and the Helmsley Building in 1978.

The New York Central Railroad went bankrupt, and in 1968 it merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad to form the Penn Central Corporation. By this point, a plan to build a skyscraper around the station, including demolishing the 42nd Street facade, had been released to the public.

The public hated it. No one more than former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was a charter member of the New York City Landmarks Commission, formed in the wake of the destruction of the old Pennsylvania Station in 1963. She said:

Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future? Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters. Maybe... this is the time to take a stand, to reverse the tide, so that we won't all end up in a uniform world of steel and glass boxes.

A lawsuit was filed, and finally decided in 1978, in favor of the City. The station would not be demolished. But it needed a major renovation and cleanup. It got them, but at a price. Not just an enormous sum of money: Amtrak, formed in 1971 to take the place of the bankrupt passenger railroads, moved all of its intercity service out of New York to the new Penn Station in 1991.

In 1983, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a State of New York agency that already ran the City's Subway system, took over the commuter operations out of Grand Central, and formed the Metro-North Commuter Railroad. It has 3 lines: The Hudson Line goes up the Hudson River to Poughkeepsie, the Harlem line goes up the other side of Westchester County, hugging the State Line with Connecticut; and the New Haven Line, in cooperation with the Connecticut Department of Transportation, goes up Long Island Sound, into Connecticut, to New Haven, with branches to New Canaan, Danbury and Waterbury. Grand Central is 2nd only to Penn Station as America's busiest passenger railroad hub.

In 2008, work began on Grand Central Madison, allowing for the Terminal to finally be connected with the Long Island Railroad, to ease commuter congestion at Penn Station. It is scheduled to open in 2023. (UPDATE: It did, on January 25.)

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February 2, 1913 was a Sunday. Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. There was professional hockey, including the National Hockey Association, from whence 1 surviving team, the Montreal Canadiens, came. But the NHA had a rule against playing on Sundays, so there were no scores on this historic day.