The East Side Access project, which brought Long Island Rail Road service to a new station beneath the terminal, was completed in January 2023.

[17][18][19] Vanderbilt attempted to get permission to merge the railroads in 1864, but Daniel Drew, a one-time competitor in the steamboat industry, bribed state legislators to scuttle the proposal.

[8] The structures on these parcels included two locomotive sheds, a car house, and a stable and horseshoeing shop for the horses that pulled Harlem Railroad carriages from 42nd Street to Madison Square.

[60] As train traffic increased in the late 1890s and early 1900s, so did the problems of smoke and soot produced by steam locomotives in the Park Avenue Tunnel, the only approach to the station.

[47][58][61] In 1899, William J. Wilgus, the New York Central's chief engineer, proposed electrifying the lines leading to the station, using a third rail power system devised by Frank J.

[71] Electrification would also remove the issue of smoke and soot exhaust; as such, the open cut could be covered over, and the railroad would benefit from enabling new real estate to be built along sixteen blocks of Park Avenue.

The proposed station was massive, containing two track levels, a large main concourse, a post office, several entrances, and a construction footprint spanning 19 blocks.

[93] The New Haven refused to approve the final design until December 1909, when the two railroads and agreed to include foundations to support a future building above Grand Central Terminal.

[69] A contract for depressing the tracks on Park Avenue south of 57th Street, as well as for excavating the storage yards, was awarded to the O'Rourke Construction Company in August 1903.

[105][106] The following year, New York Central bought two additional blocks of land east of the future terminal, bounded by Lexington Avenue, Depew Place, and 43rd and 45th streets.

[104][110][111] The excavation produced too much spoil for horse-drawn wagons, which at the time could carry 3 or 4 cubic yards (2.3 or 3.1 m3) apiece, so a 0.5-mile-long (0.80 km), 6-foot-wide (1.8 m) drainage tube was sunk 65 feet (20 m) under the ground to the East River.

[112] The construction company blamed New York Central for not making tracks available, thereby preventing its trains from hauling out debris,[113] but was loath to hire more workers because it would cost more money.

[148] The electrification of the commuter lines and subsequent completion of Grand Central Terminal contributed to the development of affluent suburbs in the lower Hudson Valley and southwestern Connecticut.

The space was operated by the Painters and Sculptors Gallery Association, founded by artists John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others.

[168] A year after it opened, the galleries established the Grand Central School of Art, which occupied 7,000 square feet (650 m2) on the seventh floor of the east wing of the terminal.

Also during the war, retired employees rejoined the terminal's staff, and women first began being trained as ticket agents, both to make up for the lack of younger men.

Due to Grand Central's importance in civilian and military transit, the terminal's windows were covered with blackout paint, which would prevent aerial bombers from easily detecting the building.

[210] The most prominent criticisms came from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who stated: 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?

[230] The most famous was the giant Kodak Colorama photos that ran along the entire east side, installed in 1950,[231] and the Westclox "Big Ben" clock over the south concourse.

[246] The group proposed to use the air rights to construct a 1.4-million-square-foot (130,000 m2), 1,029-foot-tall (314 m) building on the site of an existing 600,000-square-foot (56,000 m2) office tower at 383 Madison Avenue, near 46th Street, which partially overhung the underground rail yards.

The project restored the building's cornice, removed blackout paint applied to the skylights during World War II, installed new doors, and cleaned marble floors and walls.

At the time, more than 80 million subway and Metro-North passengers used Grand Central Terminal every year, but eight of 73 storefronts were empty, and almost three-quarters of leases were set to expire by 1990.

[293] In 2001, the September 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center complex, also in Manhattan, led to increased security in Grand Central and other transit hubs across the city.

[310][311] In December 2017, the MTA awarded contracts to replace the display boards and public announcement systems and add security cameras at Grand Central Terminal and 20 other Metro-North stations in New York state.

[314] Work on the East Side Access project, which brought Long Island Rail Road trains into the Grand Central Madison station under the existing terminal, started in 2007.

[323] The East Side Access project was restarted after a study in the 1990s that showed that more than half of LIRR riders work closer to Grand Central than to the current terminus at Penn Station.

[328] In November 2018, the MTA proposed purchasing the Hudson and Harlem Lines as well as the Grand Central Terminal for up to $35.065 million from Midtown Trackage Ventures, opting out of the 280-year lease with that company.

Another tenant, the Campbell, objected to the MTA's refusal to alter the bar's $1 million annual rent agreement while the agency was requesting a $4 billion bailout.

[338] As the outbreak became a pandemic and the state was put on lockdown, ridership declined, and the terminal was reported by The New York Times and other sources to be one of many typically busy locations in the city that had become nearly empty.

[341] In July 2020, the Great Northern Food Hall closed permanently;[342] its space was leased in April 2022 to City Winery,[343][344] which in September 2024 was replaced by a 400-seat restaurant called Grand Brasserie.