Jackie After O (8 page)

J
ackie was home at 1040 Fifth on the morning of January 22, 1975, reading the
Times
over breakfast, when she spotted a story by Paul Goldberger, the paper's young architecture critic. Her eyes locked on the front-page headline:
CITY'S NAMING OF GRAND CENTRAL AS A LANDMARK VOIDED BY THE COURT.
She hurriedly read the words on the cover and jumped to the rest of the story inside the paper. There, with the article, was a picture of the terminal's facade, with the modernist Pan Am building, completed in 1963, looming over the north side of Grand Central—a stark reminder of how easily the skyline could change for the worse. Jackie was outraged by what she read. She cared about the station. It was a place symbolic of old Manhattan, a city her grandfather had helped build.

Grand Central was one of America's finest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture, which uses classical elements and sculpture in a monumental way. The Beaux-Arts school originated in Paris, where Jackie had seen the style applied at the Opera, the Louvre, and the Grand Palais. In her own city, there was City Hall, the New York Public Library, Carnegie Hall, and the Federal Reserve Bank, to name a few—all inspiring buildings. This was a building, a very democratic one, that she believed was worth keeping. She picked up the phone.

Laurie Beckelman, a twenty-three-year-old part-time office assistant at the Municipal Art Society, was fielding calls as quickly as she could from the moment she walked in. People were alarmed by Goldberger's story, which said that State Supreme Court Justice Irving Saypol had invalidated the landmark status of Grand Central Terminal, making it possible for the station to be redeveloped as an office tower, with the bulk of the new structure plunked on top of or encompassing the old building.

The phone rang again. Beckelman reached for it, expecting this caller to be like all of the others, asking how they could help to save Grand Central.

“May I please speak with Kent Barwick?”

“May I ask who is calling?” Beckelman said, sitting at her wooden desk, which was cluttered with papers and a typewriter in the two-room office on East Sixty-Fifth Street.

“Jacqueline Onassis.”
¹

Beckelman's boss, Kent Barwick, was executive director of the Municipal Art Society (MAS). He had been a copywriter at the global advertising agency BBDO before becoming interested in preservation when three iconic places in New York were threatened with destruction: Fulton Market, the iron facades of SoHo, and, his personal favorite, McSorley's saloon. He was an ardent volunteer at MAS and was eventually asked to lead the group as executive director in spring 1969. Born on suburban Long Island, Barwick's grandparents had lived in New York and when he visited he was always awed by the vision of elegantly dressed men with their briefcases spilling out of Grand Central. But he had no idea his interest in urban landscape and architecture would lead him to this.

“I know you won't believe me,” Beckelman shouted to Barwick, a short distance away in his office, with Jackie on hold. “But there's a woman on the phone who claims she's Jackie Onassis.”

The only other person working in the cramped space that morning was a young aspiring actress, Laura Korach, and she, like Beckelman, stopped what she was doing and stood up to see Barwick's reaction to the call. After picking up the receiver, Barwick heard the unmistakable voice and signaled with a nod that it really was Jackie.
²

Grand Central had taken ten years to complete in 1913 at the staggering cost of $65 million. By 1929, the year Jackie was born, 47 million passengers were passing through the station annually.
³
Behind the terminal's Indiana limestone facade was a city within a city, a vast place with vaulted ceilings and a four-sided golden clock in the middle of the main concourse. It was filled with the vibration and bass hum of the trains and the
click-click-click
made by heels scurrying across the Tennessee marble floors and the giant schedule boards telling commuters heading to Connecticut and the Hudson River Valley their track numbers. Around Grand Central's perimeter and underground, there were restaurants and shops convenient for nearby office workers—such as those working at
Vogue
, as Jackie had, in the Graybar building next door.

The station's appearance, as well as its location in the heart of the city, had served as the perfect backdrop for drama. Hitchcock movies were filmed there. Soldiers' funeral processions paraded through. And crowds gathered to catch glimpses of living history shown live on a giant television screen: singer Frank Sinatra, boxer Joe Louis, or a rocket launch, like one during the Kennedy administration. Grand Central was a place where people could catch a train or buy a book, a meal, a stock, a bet, or, indeed, by 1975, drugs or a trick.

In the baby boom years after World War II, the car had become a symbol of American freedom. The suburbs were draining families and revenue from cities, especially New York, and train stations, in their neglect, had become seedy and run-down. Grand Central was no different. It was dangerous and depressing. Its cerulean blue ceiling depicting the zodiac in gold was virtually obscured by nicotine soot. Its windows were partly covered with advertising. Its skylights, painted black during the war, remained so. The building was starved of natural light, making it seem even dirtier. Tenants had stripped storefronts of fanciful entries, making it uglier. The roof leaked.
⁴
Although Jackie knew there was beauty beneath the grime, Grand Central had become a place that New Yorkers had given up on, ceding its waiting room to homeless people.

As Jackie read the rest of the
Times
story, she saw that Judge Saypol had found that the landmark designation imposed an “economic hardship” on the terminal's owner, Penn Central Railroad. Because landmark designation prevented any major changes, it “constitutes a taking of the property.” And taking property without compensating the owner is unconstitutional; it says so in the Fifth Amendment.

The decision was alarming to preservationists, whose efforts were being led by the venerable Municipal Art Society, formed in 1893 by architects, painters, sculptors, and civic leaders to create murals and monuments in the city's public spaces. Inevitably, the group had become engaged in bigger urban issues, successfully calling for the city's first zoning code in 1916, helping to plan the subway lines, and pioneering the Landmarks Preservation Law in 1965. That law was created as a result of the razing two years earlier of Pennsylvania Station, designed by the preeminent Beaux-Arts civic building architects McKim, Mead & White. Not only was Penn Station knocked down, but also many felt insulted by its replacement—the modernist office complex and the hideous squat black steel-and-glass arena called Madison Square Garden.

With Penn Station gone, MAS knew that Grand Central was legitimately threatened. In fact, Penn Station's destruction had been the motivating factor for the city to landmark Grand Central in 1967, in the hopes of saving it.

The railroad had hired Marcel Breuer, the Hungarian-born Bauhaus architect, to design a skyscraper for the terminal site. Breuer, known for his 1920s classic leather and metal tube chair called the Wassily, had two years before completed the Whitney Museum, a showcase for contemporary art and an institution where Jackie was an honorary trustee.
⁵
Set among traditional limestone and brownstone buildings not far from Jackie's apartment, the Whitney was built out of slabs of gray granite, designed with only a few windows, in the style of brutalism, a form of architecture that aspired to create sculpture out of concrete, but can look as heavy and harsh as it sounds. Breuer had been a leader of the brutalism movement while teaching at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where his students included Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei. In 1954, Pei had sketched what would have been the tallest structure in the world—a 108-story “hyperboloid” that also would have replaced Grand Central entirely. His proposal, which looked like a slender nuclear reactor with steel webbing on the outside, was rejected.

Breuer was determined to succeed where I. M. Pei had failed and in 1968 he completed his first proposed design for building on top of Grand Central. The plan called for fifty-five stories set on the main terminal, leaving the historic facade intact but destroying its beloved waiting room. The Landmarks Preservation Commission had rejected that proposal. Breuer's next design was for a tower three stories taller, but essentially the same shape, thin and rectangular, like the lid of a shoebox standing on its side. What was different was that the base of the building was supported with posts that dropped over the face of Grand Central like prison bars and would require the demolition of much of the terminal building. The city had denied that proposal as well.

Although the city offered other development sites to the railroad team as a consolation, Penn Central, the railroad that had provided Bobby Kennedy's funeral train from New York to Washington, was struggling financially. And Penn believed that a skyscraper at the Grand Central site was the only way to save itself. The railroad pressed its case in court. And thanks to Judge Saypol, Penn Central—on the brink of bankruptcy—had just won its first round.

In the moments after the judge's decision, Paul Goldberger, the twenty-five-year-old architecture critic, was banging out the story on a manual typewriter with four-ply carbon paper inserted beneath the keys, sitting in his corner of the “culture gulch” section on the tenth floor of the
Times's
West Forty-Third Street office.
⁶
Despite the cigarette smoke wafting through the newsroom and the
clanks
and
dings
from the keystrokes around him, Goldberger was focused on what he knew would be big news. And he knew whom to call, as the legal battle had been dragging on for years.

The big question was this: What would the city do in response to Saypol's decision?

Goldberger called Deputy Mayor Stanley Friedman and asked him if the city intended to back down.

“I think we have to appeal—this decision goes to the heart of the landmarks law,” Friedman told him.

Goldberger then called Barwick for a quote.

“It is a tragic blow to the government's efforts to make New York a livable city,” Barwick said. “We think the public has a basic right to protect the great buildings of the past and we mean to fight for that right.”

After he hung up with the reporter, Barwick, fuming over Saypol's decision, huddled with friends and advisers. He was hearing that the railroad was going to try to collect $60 million in damages from the city if officials appealed the case, a devastating thought for politicians at a time when New York was facing a financial collapse of its own for the same reason as the railroad: people were moving out in the midst of an international recession. Barwick was worried that municipal officials—especially New York mayor Abraham Beame, who began his career as an accountant—might lose their resolve to wage an expensive legal fight.

Beame, elected the year before, was struggling with New York's worst fiscal calamity since the Great Depression. After years of overspending combined with declining revenue, the city couldn't pay its bills and was having trouble borrowing to do so. Beame was trying to find ways to slash the budget, which meant firing teachers, fire fighters, and police officers. He had neither the time nor the inclination to worry about spending more money to fight Penn Central. The city coffers were empty, its debts enormous.

After considering all of this, Barwick called Goldberger back, offering a quote that would make it more uncomfortable for Beame to drop the landmark designation.

“We're forming a committee to save the terminal and support the city in its expected appeal,” Barwick told him. Goldberger added the information to his story, ripped the carbon book out of his typewriter, turned it in to his editor, and went home, not knowing that the story would move Jackie to call the MAS when it was published the next day.

And here she was, on the phone with Barwick.

“What can I do to help?” Jackie asked.

“We're putting together a committee but the big worry is that Mayor Beame will drop the case,” said Barwick. “We're having a press conference. I can imagine how busy your schedule is.”

“Well, I'm going to be around,” Jackie told him.

“We're thinking of issuing a statement and we can send it to your staff and see if it's something you can support.”

“I don't have a staff,” Jackie said, not entirely truthfully.

Barwick was shocked. In the backbiting circles of New York society Jackie was known to be virtually unapproachable, as well as domineering in her association with certain circles, like the Metropolitan Museum. Of course, any person with such celebrity would be difficult, Barwick thought. Yet here she was being pleasant, conversational, and professional, offering to do work herself.

Barwick hung up and gave marching orders to Beckelman, who had been part of MAS for two years and was making a $5,500 annual salary. In jeans and a sheepskin coat, the svelte blond headed over to Jackie's apartment to get her signature on a letter that was also signed by architect Philip Johnson, who had become a rival of his old professor, Breuer. The document was the first step to organize an official committee to save Grand Central. A houseboy met Beckelman at Jackie's apartment door. There was some confusion as to why Beckelman was there, and he and Jackie had an exchange—in French—before she told him to let in the visitor.