I know that I shouldn’t trust the subway on Saturday – it takes me more than 40 minutes to arrive at the Grand Central. I am confused: although I have spent my last 2 weeks with mapping and researching its neighborhood, I don’t know where to look for the Transit Museum. By the time I find it, it’s too late. The group has just left, the vendors tell me. They left that way.
If it’s impossible to follow a group of 20 people somewhere, then it’s the Grand Central. As I stand scanning the passers-by of the Main Concourse, it appears to me that everybody belongs to a group of twenty. All individuals tend to join temporary groups, formed only to confuse me and then disappear.
I decide to go on, with my own tour. I browse through the passages for a while, before leaving the ’subsurface pedestrian circulation system’ and arriving to the street level. I go for a walk around the subdistrict, whose buildings I know by heart. The subdistrict was created to enable owners of the Grand Central to transfer the availabel air rights (unused development rights) from above the Terminal. At the time when the district was created, there was still more than 1,6 million square feet of development rights to use on that given lot, that is, a lot of building potentials, that couldn’t be used right on the site, but had to be transferred to a neighboring location. This disponible ammount of potentially very profitable space have inspired the imagination of many developers.
