Designed by Sloan & Robertson in the Art Deco style, the Graybar Building is at 420–430 Lexington Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal.

The ground floor includes the "Graybar Passage", a publicly accessible passageway that leads from Lexington Avenue to Grand Central Terminal.

On upper stories, the Graybar Building contains office space with setbacks and "light courts" to conform with the 1916 Zoning Resolution.

[1] The western side of the building underneath the Park Avenue Viaduct faces Depew Place, which was laid out when the original Grand Central Depot was built in the late 19th century, and destroyed with the construction of the current terminal.

[4] The Graybar Building's site, located just east of the depot and station, was partly occupied by the original Grand Central Palace, which was built c. 1893[5][6] and later used as a hotel.

[5][8] On January 8, 1902, a crash between two steam trains in the Park Avenue Tunnel killed 15 people,[9][10][11] leading New York Central president William H. Newman to announce the construction of a new underground terminal station.

[14] In 1902, several months after the fatal Park Avenue Tunnel crash, the trustees of the Goelet estate offered the land to New York Central for use as a post office.

[19] The Graybar Building was designed by Sloan & Robertson in the Art Deco style,[1][22] with Clyde R. Place as consulting engineer.

[26] Another proposal to make use of the Graybar Building site's air rights was presented in 2012 as part of a rezoning of East Midtown.

[27] The 2012 proposal led to the designation of the Graybar Building as a city landmark in 2016, in order to prevent it from being torn down for air rights development.

[32][29] Some of the spandrels within each window contain black brick; these give the appearance of "subtle vertical bands" that contrast with the facade's more prominent portions to "accentuate the structure's height".

[34][36] Building manager Herbert Metz told the Times in 1955 that the rat sculptures "symbolize a ship", which by extension, evokes imagery of a port.

[38] On the center portal is a relief, which displays the capital letters "graybar building" and depicts two "winged guardian creatures".

[34] It was planned in conjunction with a north–south hall, which would have led from Grand Central to an unbuilt expansion of the post office adjoining the north side of the Graybar Building.

The first two vaults, as viewed from leaving Grand Central, are painted with cumulus clouds, while the third contains a 1927 mural by Edward Trumbull depicting American transportation.

The basements hold several tracks and platforms; break rooms for the "red cap" porters at Grand Central; and the terminal's M42 electrical substation.

[35][51][52] West of the substation are numerous auxiliary facilities, including storerooms for equipment; a coal hopper; and shops for carpenters, painter, ironworkers, masons, pipefitters, electricians and truck repairers, and battery suppliers.

[35] An underground passage from the New York City Subway's Grand Central–42nd Street station formerly led to the southern portal of the Graybar Building.

[57][55][58] From January 1, 1990, to its closure, there had been 365 felonies committed in the Graybar subway passage, making it the most dangerous of the 15 passageways ordered closed.

The passageway had been located behind a token booth, making it hard to patrol; at the time of its closure, the hallway was described as being "deceptively long and treacherous".

[29][67] By early 1927, some 1,100 workers were furnishing the interiors with such materials including 5,000 doors,[29][68] while Edward Trumbull completed the murals in the Graybar Passage on the building's first floor.

[84][85] The building's namesake Graybar Electric Company occupied the 17th floor,[86] while advertiser J. Walter Thompson leased additional space.

[88] Yet other early tenants included Remington Rand, Turner Construction, YMCA, and the Associated Architects responsible in the design of Rockefeller Center.

[90] Modern tenants in the Graybar Building include the Metro-North Railroad, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York Life Insurance Company, and DeWitt Stern Group.

[84] The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1926 described how the building's floor space was equivalent to the area of several blocks in Midtown if spread out onto a single surface.

[92] The New York Herald Tribune observed that if all the materials for the building were to arrive at once, it would require 4,625 freight train cars, stretching 50 miles (80 km).

In June 1927, one Herald Tribune reader wrote a letter to that newspaper, saying that the building is "enormous, solid, lofty and of course, embodies the most modern knowledge and skill", but calling the lack of ornamentation a literal "colossal setback".

Vickers said that "the simple, austere front represents the designer's efforts to symbolize still further the tremendous forces responsible for the seething giants in our big city".

[95] The magazine Brooklyn Life said in 1929 that the Graybar Building represented an "impressive beauty of steel bulk" with "severe and exotic statuary".

[84][97] The architect Robert A. M. Stern, in his book New York 1930, called the Graybar Building a "quintessential commercial colossus" that symbolized "the culture of congestion".