There isn’t a single time I walk through Grand Central Station’s magnificent ex-waiting room that I don’t deplore the decision to basically kick the public out. It is now a space people bustle through on their way in and out between 42nd Street and the terminal. Nobody sits down here anymore. The only reason to linger is to buy something. If you can believe it, it has–at least temporarily–been re-named some kind of food court and is filled with stalls selling stuff.
Before the last GCS renovation, the waiting room was apparently attracting the homeless, the ranks of which have of course risen dramatically over the past thirty years, and rose dramatically again under Emperor Bloomberg. I mean, let’s not do something to change the socio-economic conditions that breed homelessness–let’s just hide them from public view.
If there is a more potent symbol of the destruction of the public sector in post-Reagan USA than this travesty of a once-great civic amenity, I haven’t seen it. If you want to sit and wait for your train, you now are shunted to the cramped, low-ceilinged station master’s office. Because who are you, anyway? Just a lowly passenger, not the inhabitant of a metropolis that honors, includes, enfolds in grandeur its citizens and visitors.