City - NY - The short lived Grand Central 1900 - Side by Side
by Mike Savad
Title
City - NY - The short lived Grand Central 1900 - Side by Side
Artist
Mike Savad
Medium
Photograph - Colorized Photo
Description
Colorized photo from 1900
Original Title: Grand Central Depot
Photographer: Detroit Publishing
Location: East 42 St, NY
A quick history of this building. It started in the mid to late 1800s as a small train station. It quickly became larger, and they built it into a large Victorian structure, and it was called Snook's station, named after the guy that designed it. I believe it took about 10 or so years before it was out of date, and it was remodeled (this confused me at first I thought there were four buildings in this spot. They added 3 more floors and made it larger, covered it in granite, changed the roof domes, added large metal eagles.
It was was really grand, very elegant. But there was a huge glaring flaw, there weren't enough tracks, only four at the time. And there was no ventilation. The heat was overbearing, it was full of steam and smoke, and there were long crowded lines. Later on, two years later, there was an accident in the tunnel killing over a dozen people, and injuring many more, after that, they no longer allowed steam trains in this area. After that second year, they demolished the building and replaced it with what we have now. As for the eagles, they all seemed to fly to different areas of the country, popping up in odd places. One of them were donated back to the current station.
Coloring this was far more complex than I thought it would be. I liked those little awnings on the left, and that peanut cart on the right. But there are a lot of details, and well over a 100 people in this. Being a stickler for detail is probably my weak point, because I colored all of it in.
I was able to get colors from a few postcards, the domes ranged from dark brown, to green to even gold. I figured that since the building wasn't that old, its probably still shiny copper or at least something ready to be tarnished. The building was granite, but showed it as red, this is why you can't rely on postcards alone.
Uploaded
May 7th, 2019
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