Grand Central Station

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Yet another Gossip Girl  filming location that I stalked a few weeks back while vacationing in Manhattan is the train station known as Grand Central Terminal.  But being that Grand Central has actually been featured in more than a few hundred productions since it first opened in 1913, it’s not really accurate to refer to the place simply as a “Gossip Girl filming location”.  Truth be told, being that the building is a National Historic Landmark and has been in operation for close to a century now, it’s really not fair to refer to the place as a “filming location” at all.  The fact that the station has been immortalized in countless films and television shows over the years is more of a side-note than anything else.  Truth be told, Grand Central Station, or Grand Central Terminal as it is officially called, is not only the largest train station in the entire world, but is also a marvel of modern-day architecture and one of the cornerstones of New York History.  The terminal, which boasts 44 platforms and 67 different tracks and covers over 48 acres of space!!!, first opened on February 2, 1913 after a staggering ten years of construction.  The Beaux-Arts style building was actually designed by two architectural firms – the firm of Reed & Stern handled the engineering, while Warren and Westmore conducted the aesthetic composition.  And the place truly is a site to behold!   The station’s main concourse is absolutely breathtaking – I mean my breath was literally taken away the first time I saw it!  Seeing the huge shafts of sunlight stream through the concourse’s many window panels, as Hal Morey captured so beautifully in this photograph, is something everyone should experience in person at least once in their lives. The main concourse’s Grand Staircase which is made of marble and which was modeled after the main staircase in the Paris Opera House, is flanked by three beautiful – and HUGE – 75-foot tall leaded glass windows (pictured above).

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On a side note – The Grand Staircase is also, coincidentally, where I took one of my very favorite photographs of New York (pictured above)!  LOL LOL LOL

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But my favorite part of the terminal’s main concourse has to be its ceiling!  Oh, the ceiling!  Grand Central’s beautiful, vaulted ceiling, which features a mural of  Zodiac signs painted backwards was designed and created in 1912 by artist Paul Helleu and contains over 2,500 stars which actually light up.  The reason for the backwards Zodiac depiction, you ask?   The mural is supposed to represent the view of the stars a god would see while looking down upon planet Earth through the heavens.

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The exterior of Grand Central Station is also quite remarkable, as you can see in the above photograph. 

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In 1914, while the station was under construction, French sculptor Jules-Alexis Coutans designed a 48 -foot tall statue of the Roman gods Minerva, Hercules, and Mercury which was to sit sentinel above Grand Central’s 42nd Street entrance.  The statue, which was carved by the John Donnelly Company, also boasts a central glass clock measuring a whopping 13 feet in circumference.  The clock was designed by none other than Tiffany & Co. and represents the largest example of Tiffany Glass in the entire world.

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At night, the exterior becomes even more spectacular. 

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As you can see in the above picture, Grand Central is usually bustling with commuters and visitors alike!  In fact, more than 500,000 people walk through the terminal’s doors EACH DAY!!!!  (No, that’s not a typo – I really meant EACH DAY!)  According to this fabulous article, in the year 1947 alone over 65 MILLION people visited Grand Central – an amount which equaled 40% of the entire popular of the United States at the time!

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Which makes it all the more amazing that the station’s doors were almost shuttered in the 1950s.   Due to the decline of railroads as a popular means of transportation, the terminal faced demolition on numerous different occasions beginning in the year 1954.  Thankfully all such plans were subsequently thwarted, until 1967 when Penn Central Railroad announced its plans to tear down Grand Central and replace it with a sixty-plus story office building.  Thankfully, New York preservationists, most notably former First Lady Jackie O., stepped in to stop the project.  Jackie’s efforts took her all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where a ten year battle was fought over the station.  Penn Central eventually lost the case and Grand Central was awarded landmark status, eliminating any further possibility of it ever being destroyed or changed. In 1994, the terminal was taken over by the Metro-North company, who subsequently began an extensive renovation process, restoring the terminal to her original glory to the tune of $250 million.  Today Grand Central is as beautiful, and as busy, as ever.  Besides being simply a commuter hub, today’s Grand Central Station also boasts fifty different retail stores and five different upscale restaurants, including the world-famous Oyster Bar which has been in operation since the station first opened in 1913.  And, of course, as I mentioned before, the terminal is also a frequent filming location!

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Grand Central has been featured in two different episodes of Gossip Girl – the Pilot episode and the Season Two episode entitled “Oh Brother, Where Bart Thou?”.  In the Pilot, It-girl Serena van der Woodsen is spotted at Grand Central while making her infamous return to New York after a year spent in a Connecticut boarding school.

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In that same episode, Rufus Humphrey picks up his kids, Dan and Jenny, at Grand Central after a weekend spent with their mother.

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And yet again in that very same episode, Grand Central’s famous Campbell Apartment Bar, which I have blogged about once before, shows up at the site of Nate and Serena’s illicit tryst.

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In the “Oh Brother, Where Bart Thou?” episode, Rufus confronts Lily about the child she never told him about while standing in the middle of Grand Central’s main concourse.

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The Campbell Apartment also shows up in that episode as the spot where Chuck Bass hires a private investigator to look into the background of his deceased father’s widow.

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Grand Central, as well as its flap-board destination sign, figure prominently in the end of fave teeny-bopper movie Just My Luck.

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Other movies that have filmed at the terminal include North By Northwest, Armageddon, Carlito’s Way, Hackers, I Am Legend, K-PAX, Men In Black and its sequel Men In Black II, Midnight Run, Old Dogs, Party Monster, Revolutionary Road, The Bone Collector, The Cotton Club, The Fisher King, One Fine Day, Conspiracy Theory, Midnight Run, Loser, Falling In Love, The Prince of Tides, The Freshman, The Perfect Score, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, and Unfaithful.  And, Grand Central replicas have even been built on studio soundstages when filming on location at the actual station wasn’t feasible, as was the case with Superman, Twentieth Century, Going Hollywood, The Thin Man Goes Home and Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

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On a “must-see” side note – One of Grand Central’s most famous spots, an area which I, sadly, have yet to visit, is the Whispering Gallery, which is located in the station’s Dining Concourse.  As the name suggests, thanks to the laws of physics and the Gallery’s domed ceiling, two friends can stand at opposite corners of the room, face the walls, and whisper to each other and those whispers will be carried, quite loudly, from one corner of the room to the other.  How amazingly cool is that?  Fellow stalker Owen has even tested out this marvel of science and says it really does work!  I absolutely cannot wait to try it out myself next year!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Grand Central Station is located on 42nd Street, in between Lexington and Park Avenues.  Docent-led tours of the station are given each Wednesday afternoon at 12:30 p.m. by the Municipal Arts Society.  The Whispering Gallery is located in the station’s Dining Concourse near the world-famous Oyster Bar.  The Campbell Apartment is located at 15 Vanderbilt Avenue, just off Grand Central’s main concourse area.  Sadly though, the bar has recently come under new ownership and the dress code has been changed.  And, for some incredibly odd reason, it seems no one on the Campbell Apartment staff knows exactly what the new dress code entails.  When we called the bar to inquire about the dress code prior to our arrival, we were told that jeans and tennis shoes were permissible. But when we showed up we were denied entrance . . . due to our jeans and tennis shoes.  LOL  Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind a place upholding a dress code, at all.  In fact, I quite like it.  But if you’re going to do so, the staff should darn well be able to tell patrons CORRECTLY what that dress code is!

The Central Park Conservatory Water

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Because I spoke only very briefly about the Central Park Conservatory Water in yesterday’s post regarding the filming of Gossip Girl, today I thought I’d do a more in-depth blog on that location and the myriad of filming that has taken place there over the years.  So, here goes.  🙂   The Conservatory Water is so named because in the original plans for Central Park, which were drawn up in 1857 by designers Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, an oval-shaped conservatory, or greenhouse, containing tropical plants was to be situated in the area where the Model Boat Pond now stands.  When the money for that particular project fell through, Olmstead and Vaux instead decided to place an oval-shaped model boat pond, designed after those in Paris’ Jardin du Luxembourg, in the exact spot where the conservatory was originally positioned.  Hence the name “Conservatory Water”.  Over the years, the Pond became incredibly popular with children and adults alike and, thanks to the model yacht races which are held there each weekend, the area has come to be more commonly known as the “Model Boat Pond”.  In fact, ask any New Yorker for directions to the Conservatory Water and I doubt they’d know what you were talking about.  🙂

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Besides its weekend boat races, the Conservatory Water is also famous for two statues which are situated along its perimeter.  The statue pictured above is of children’s author Hans Christian Andersen, who penned the stories “The Little Mermaid”, “The Snow Queen”, and “Thumbelina”, among countless others.   In the statue Hans is depicted reading his tale “The Ugly Duckling” to an attentive little duck.  So cute!!!  And please don’t ask what the heck I am wearing in the above picture – it was a freezing cold and rainy day in New York and I threw on whatever warm clothes I could find.  LOL

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At the North end of the pond sits the famous Alice in Wonderland statue, in which Alice cavorts atop a life-sized mushroom with her friends the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Dormouse, and the White Rabbit.  The statue was commissioned in 1959 by George T. Delacorte, founder of the Dell Publishing Company, in honor of his wife.  Legend has it that George’s face was the model for the face of the Mad Hatter in the statue.  🙂

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The Model Boat Pond is so incredibly beautiful and picturesque, with its flat pool of reflecting water, curving benches running along its perimeter, lush green foliage and pink cherry trees juxtaposed against the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, that it’s not very hard to see why producers have returned to film there time and time again.

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In fave movie 13 Going On 30, the Model Boat Pond shows up very briefly during the montage scene in which Jenna is shown enjoying her newfound age.  You can see the Alice and Wonderland statue in the background of the first screen capture pictured above.

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In fave show Sex and the City, the Model Boat Pond shows up in the Season One episode entitled “The Power of Female Sex”, in the scene in which Carrie takes French Architect Gilles on a tour of the city.  While at the Pond, Carrie says, “I felt like I had landed in a Claude Lelouch film”, Lelouch being a French film director known for his picturesque cinematography.  The Alice and Wonderland statue shows up in this scene, as well – Carrie is sitting on top of it in the first screen capture pictured above.

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In Just My Luck, yet another of my favorite teeny-bopper movies, cutie Chris Pine has some incredibly bad luck while visiting the Model Boat Pond at the very beginning of the film.  Again you’ll notice the Alice in Wonderland statue pictured in the background above.  It seems to be a favorite of filmmakers.  🙂

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In the 1998 movie The Object of my Affection, it is while sitting on a bench overlooking the Pond that my girl Jen Aniston tells Paul Rudd that she is pregnant.

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In fave movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Fred is followed by Doc Golightly, Holly’s former husband, while taking a stroll near the Conservatory Water.

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And in the 1999 movie Stuart Little, Stuart (who was voiced by none other than Alex P. Keaton himself – Michael J. Fox) and his pal Jonathan Lipnicki race a model sailboat at the Pond.  (That’s Hugh Laurie, aka Dr. House M.D., who plays Stuart and Jonathan’s dad in the flick, pictured in the second screen capture above!)

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The producers definitely took some liberties while filming this scene, though, because while the race starts out at the Model Boat Pond, it ends up in the Central Park Reservoir, which, contrary to what the movie would have you believe, is not actually connected to the Pond and is, in fact, located quite a few miles away.

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At one point, the boats even sail under a small bridge, but, being that the Model Boat Pond has no bridge, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I’m fairly certain this scene wasn’t actually filmed in Central Park.  My guess is that the scene was filmed a few thousand miles away on a soundstage at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City.  LOL  When watching that scene, you’ll notice that the camera never pans back far enough to show the entire Pond, leading me to believe that producers built their own version of it at the studio in Los Angeles which they then used for the filming.

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The Pond also showed up in I’m Not Rappaport, F/X, Jungle 2 Jungle, The Mirror Has Two Faces, Key Exchange and in 1964’s The World of Henry Orient.  And it has even been immortalized in print, as well!  In J.D. Salinger’s famous Catcher in the Rye novel, Holden Caulfield laments his problems to the Conservatory Water’s resident ducks.

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I honestly cannot recommend stalking the Model Boat Pond enough!!  It is one of my very favorite places in all of New York!  In fact, one of my favorite things to do while visiting the city is to grab a bagel from a street vendor and eat it while sitting on one of the many benches surrounding the Pond – weather permitting, of course.  🙂  Which is exactly what my best friend, Kylee, and fiancé are doing in the above photograph which was taken during my 30th birthday trip to the Big Apple.  🙂  Ironically enough, while doing research on the Pond for today’s post, I kept running across the following sentence – or some variation of it – written again and again: “The Conservatory Water is so relaxing and peaceful that you almost forget you are in New York.”  But to me, the Pond is a perfect representation of what it is that makes New York so incredibly unique.  I mean where else can you find a huge and incredibly quiet and picturesque piece of nature located smack dab in the middle of a beautiful, bustling, towering city?  🙂  No, for me, the Model Boat Pond couldn’t be more New York and I never forget what city I am in while visiting it!  🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The Conservatory Water, aka the Model Boat Pond, is located in Central Park on New York’s Upper East Side and can be reached from 72nd through 75th Streets.