RHIANNON: The celestial ceiling. This is my very favorite thing to look at here. MICHAEL: I mean, when you look at that ceiling, a machine didn't put that ceiling on. The plaster on that ceiling was all done by hand. That's all effort. DANNY: I mean, it's almost natural to have an open space and look up, right? If you're walking through the forest, you're looking at trees, you're looking pretty much at your level. But when you get into an opening, it's like, wow, a grand space. You look up and to have a building this old, this open, with no pillars or columns to support the ceiling, just that architecturally is quite a feat. Then you, you also draw on the ceiling. So now I could have something to look at. And just a, just a grand space of it, it makes you feel small in such a big place, you know, and it reminds us that, you know, take a look at your surroundings. RHIANNON: Even before Grand Central Terminal officially opened on February 2, 1913, New Yorkers were already talking about the mural that had been painted on its vaulted ceiling, with the New York Times telling of its “effect of illimitable space” and how “fortunately there are no chairs in the concourse or… some passengers might miss their trains while contemplating this starry picture.” Less than two months after the Terminal opened one astute commuter noticed the design of the ceiling is backwards; west is east, and east is west. This was a bit embarrassing for the New York Central Railroad who had published a pamphlet when the terminal opened boasting that “it is safe to say that many school children will go to Grand Central Terminal to study this representation of the heavens.” Exactly how this happened remains a bit of a mystery, there are many theories. I like the way architect John Belle, who oversaw the ceiling’s major restoration in the 90s, put it: “Astrological realism was not the objective of either the architect or the artists, they created a formal design complementing proportions of the classical architecture of the Main Concourse and dramatizing the limitless sense of space.” The renovation took place over 9 months in full view of commuters. Decades of pollution and smoking in the concourse had darkened the ceiling to the point that the mural was barely visible. You can get a sense of how it used to look – if you can find the crab, the symbol for the astrological sign of cancer, you’ll see one of his claws is pointing to a small, dark rectangle which overlaps the cornice. GEORGE: We left the patch approximately 8 inches by 20 inches, which demonstrates what the ceiling had looked like prior to the cleaning. RHIANNON: There are a couple things we can look at to understand some of the history of the space. GEORGE: One would be the hole in the ceiling where the Redstone rocket was installed back in 1958. RHIANNON: Towards the center of the ceiling, above one of the two fish, you’ll see a small black hole. GEORGE: Russia beat us up into space with Sputnik. The United States needed to show their might and the future of space travel. So they had installed a Redstone rocket on the main concourse floor, which was a unmanned rocket. The hole in the ceiling was because they needed to stabilize the rocket. So they created a hole in the ceiling and they ran a wire up into the ceiling to stabilize it. The terminal had kept that hole to show that it's part of history.