Now that my bathroom iPod alphabetical playback by song title has reached the letter "G," I heard one of my favorites, "Grand Central Station." When it came on, I replayed it. Never mind that what she's singing about is really Grand Central Terminal, poetic songwriting license is allowed. Two syllables rather than three fit better.
She wrote he song soon after 9//11, and it appears on her "Between Here and Now" album. Since the events of 9/11 are now 22 years ago, the imagery of the song might be lost on someone who didn't experience the events of that day firsthand, or live in the immediate aftermath. Much like Don McLean's "American Pie," you need a back story.
The Twin Towers wee not the only buildings that were destroyed. Five others were as well, leaving a massive. smoldering pit of destruction. When the dust settled the job of digging out and removing the debris started. Along with the title ground zero, the area became known as the Pile.
Police, firefighters, construction workers were sent out to recover anything that could be DNA tested for identification. People were really turned into dust.
The air around ground zero was not good. The collapse of the buildings released A LOT of asbestos, and cancer cases started to show themselves not too long after. In fact, there are still law firms that advertise that if you were at the site or near there on 9//11 and have now been diagnosed with cancer, you might be entitled to reimbursement from a special fund that apparently still has money.
Along with looking for bone fragments, anything that could be identified as belonging to someone was retrieved from the site. My co-worker Isabel's wallet was recovered and was turned over to the NYC Police Department's Property Clerk. Isabel survived, and treated us to a show-and-tell of her very singed wallet when she got a notice to retrieve her wallet.
I don't remember how much longer after her retrieval, I received a notice that my id cards were recovered. My Empire BlueCross BlueShield id card, as well as my World Trade Center access card were to be picked up from One Police Plaza.
When I picked them up and signed for them, the officer Jerry told me the story that a wallet from someone on one of the two 767s was found on the street several blocks from the site. Her husband came and picked it up.
The around the clock recovery of anything from the site went on for months. It became known as working on the pile. Someone I know whose brother-in-law was working for Connor Security after retiring from the phone company was assigned to the lobby of one of the buildings at the fire station.
He was lost, and I went to the funeral in Lynbrook despite the fact that there was no body or anything from a body that was recovered. Dead was presumed.
The search for remains was so intense that many months after that funeral the morgue notified the widow that DNA from bones was recovered from a site that was approximated where her husband might have been in the lobby when the building came down. There was now positive DNA evidence of her deceased husband. I don't really know if they held a second funeral service. Talk about closure.
All the images of post 9/11 and Grand Central are there in the song. ...Flyers coverin' every wall, faces of the missing are all I see..."
Even before the dust settled at ground zero people were walking near the site holding photos of loved ones who didn't come home. Penn Station and Grand Central became filled with photos and flyers posted on a makeshift wall. As soon as you entered Grand Central from 42nd Street on the left there was an array of information on the missing. These flyers and photos remained up for quite some time before I guess they were moved to the 9/11 museum.
"And all these voice keep on askin' me to take them Grand Central Station..."
"And now Hercules is starin' down at me...Next to him's Minerva and Mercury..."
These of course are the three figures depicted outside over the center of Grand Central. There's a clock there as well, which I forget about. The names of the three figures would make a great trivia question for Jeopardy. Minerva is depicted writing something.
In the 60s I worked with a woman who claimed she knew the model for the Minerva statue. It's possible. She wasn't prone to telling tales. The statuary was installed in 1914.
The sculptor of the statues was a Frenchman who designed the trio but never came the States to see it made. He sent the plans over and the statues were made in Long Island City by William Bradley and Son.
You can't look up Park Avenue at Grand Central Terminal and not see the building behind it. Originally it was the Pan Am building (now MetLife) and boasted a helipad for shuttle helicopters to land for New York Airways, ferrying those that could afford it to and from LaGuardia and Kennedy airports. I always thought of the building as having a garage door look to it when you looked uptown from say 34th Street.
The helicopters annoyed a lot of people who lived nearby and the service lasted until one of them landed on the roof and suffered metal fatigue in its landing gear. The result wasn't pretty when the spinning rotors bounced on the landing pad. Four people were killed. No more rooftop helicopters coming over Midtown Manhattan.
It was a long time ago when the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the New York Central to form Penn Central. The two Manhattan railroad stations became prime assets for Penn Central when it declared bankruptcy.
Penn Station was razed in 1964, taking two years to demolish it. It didn't take long for the suddenly awake cognoscenti of New York society to realize that an architectural gem had now been destroyed.
The fate of Grand Central Terminal was pulled into the bankruptcy proceedings. Famously, Jackie Onassis Kennedy spearheaded a drive to save Grand Central Terminal from the same fate as Penn Station.
I remember her son, John Kennedy Jr., joking that he knew his mother wasn't one for using mass transit, but that didn't prevent her from trying to save an architectural gem.
Thus..."the pull of home an' the stars upon that painted dome sill shine..."
Thomas Wolfe famously wrote about the Old Penn Station that it, "held the sound of time." The same can be said for Grand Central when, "...an' all those voices keep askin' me to take them to Grand Central Station..."
Grand Central Station
©Words and music by Mary Chapin Carpenter
Got my work clothes on for love, sweat and dirt
All this holy dust upon my face an' shirt
Headin' uptown now, just as the shifts are changin'To Grand Central Station
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