Grand Central Terminal main concourse ceiling
— — a sky painted backward, with two thousand stars.
Not only on a wall.
“One hundred twenty-five feet above the main concourse, the Mediterranean winter sky stretches across a barrel vault — gold zodiac figures, more than two thousand painted stars, fifty-nine of them lit. The mural was designed by Paul César Helleu in 1912 and famously reversed: east and west swapped, as if seen from above. A small dark patch in the northwest corner was left during the 1998 cleaning to show what eight decades of tobacco smoke had done.
Grand Central Terminal main concourse ceiling, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Grand Central Terminal opened to the public on February 2, 1913, designed by the firms of Reed and Stem and Warren and Wetmore. The main concourse measures 275 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 125 feet high to the crown of the ceiling. The terminal sits at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and handles forty-four tracks across two levels, more than any other railway station in the world. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976 after a Supreme Court case saved it from demolition.
The ceiling shows the constellations of the Mediterranean winter sky in gold leaf on a cerulean ground. Paul César Helleu, a French painter and friend of John Singer Sargent, provided the design in 1912; Charles Basing of the Hewlett-Basing studio executed the painting. Fifty-nine of the brightest stars carry small electric lights, originally bare bulbs and now fibre optics. The image is famously reversed: east is where west should be. Two explanations survive — a medieval convention of viewing the heavens from God's perspective, and a draftsman's transposition that no one corrected before the paint dried.
The concourse is open from 5:15 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. daily and is free to enter. The four-faced opal clock above the central information booth is the most-photographed point in the room; the ceiling reads best from the Vanderbilt Hall stairs on the west side. The Municipal Art Society runs ninety-minute tours that include the ceiling, the Whispering Gallery outside the Oyster Bar, and the secret platform 61. The terminal is served by the 4, 5, 6, 7, and S subway lines and Metro-North commuter rail.