Ode to a Beautiful Public Space.

A Mercifully Brief Note.

Last weekend I was in New York to attend an event held annually at the Yale Club, at 44^th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue. Out walking with a friend at the corner of 42^nd Street and Lexington Avenue, I suggested we return to the venue by way of the concourse at Grand Central Terminal.

The concourse at Grand Central is, to my eye, one of the world’s great public indoor spaces. It is a large, open space, its multi-story, vaulted ceiling decorated with a star map. Defining the space are the ticket windows and ramp up to 42^nd Street on the south side, the grand staircase leading up to the Vanderbilt Avenue exit on the west side, the track entrances, along with escalators leading up into the MetLife Building (which I still think of as the PanAm building, but that’s just a personal problem) on the north side, and the Information Booth in the middle. The boundaries on the east side are a little less clear. High, arched windows give natural light during the day. The name “Grand Central” is apt. It's a great and beautiful space. But to me, what really gives the Grand Central concourse its beauty is its heartbeat.

One theory holds that we find beautiful those things supportive or emblematic of life. A proponent of this theory may assert, for example, that people in all cultures regard flowers as beautiful. Grand Central Terminal is no chilly monument. The life of the great city it serves moves through it. Wall Street commuters rush from their trains to the Lexington Avenue Subway. Lovers meet, for everything from family engagement parties to clandestine trysts. They part, too, for a day, a month, a year, or for good. New York families send their children off to college, and then welcome them home again. Mom comes in from White Plains or Westport for dinner and a Broadway show. In the days before text messages allowed us to adjust our plans on the fly, the Information Booth was a common location for pre-arranged meetings. Somehow in this jumble of purposes, the hundreds of people crisscrossing the terminal at any moment never seem to collide – an unchoreographed dance in the heart of the city, human beauty fitting for a grand space.

The life of the terminal has distinct aromas too. Pass through the portal to your track, and the smell of creosote and oil, as much as the conductor, shouts, “All aboard!” Under the staircase to Vanderbilt Avenue is Zara’s Bread Basket, a classic New York high-speed, high-volume, stand-up food counter, selling mostly baked goods. In graduate school, I stopped there often on my way to the train at the end of a visit to New York. Not long after I moved to San Francisco, I was in New York on business, and happened to walk past Zara’s. Its aroma of cinnamon, cream cheese, and coffee nearly beguiled me into buying a bagel and coffee and boarding the next train to New Haven.

For many commuters from Westchester County and Connecticut, Grand Central is on the way to Wall Street. Can we apply the life-is-beauty test to the financial markets without straining the metaphor too much? Probably not, but let me try. It might at least shed some light on the ambivalence with which many view our capital markets. On the plus side, the markets channel financing to the economic activities – agriculture, mining, manufacturing, communications, just as a start – essential to our modern lives. They provide savers with a long-term store of value and participation in the increase of the productive economy. I’d argue there is a certain beauty in that. But parasitic actors, whether criminal or not, impair the flow of capital and the returns to savers. They make the unchoreographed dance of the financial markets more treacherous than the foot traffic at Grand Central. They can engender skepticism, keeping some that should be taking the risks of investing away from the markets, just as too big an epidemic of pickpockets might scare people away from Grand Central.

Capital market activity is largely virtual, in the sense that it no longer relies as it once did on large physical edifices. That means that market participants can adjust the scale of their activities as the flow of economic opportunity changes. Since Grand Central is a transportation hub, it is inherently a physical space. It’s the same size today as when it opened in 1913. Yet miraculously, it maintains a balance between its physical size and the pace of the life moving through it. Seldom so empty as to seem cavernous or so crowded as to seem oppressive, Grand Central thrums with the variegated life of New York City, which imbues the grand space with a unique beauty.