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Terminal City by Linda Fairstein – a thriller set in New York (beneath Grand Central Station)

24th August 2014

Terminal City by Linda Fairstein – a thriller set in New York.

IMG_2260Terminal City is the sixteenth book in the Alexandra Cooper series by Linda Fairstein. I have to confess I have not read any of the other fifteen, but they are now firmly on my list. The book is a real page turner set almost exclusively in the few blocks around (and beneath) Grand Central Station. The story is great, but Grand Central – and its history – is actually the hero of the book. Ms Fairstein has clearly done a lot of detailed research… Did you know that at the end of the 19th Century, when the New York gentry lived at the southern tip of Manhattan, people travelled north by carriage to 42nd Street to catch trains from the newly built Grand Central Station – coal powered steam trains that weren’t allowed any further south because of the fear that sparks from their burning coals might set the smart parts of Manhattan alight…? Or that 4th Avenue was renamed Park Avenue once the open tracks north of Grand Central were electrified in 1913 and buried to surface again at 125th Street? And the covering over of the tracks released an enormous amount of prime real estate onto the market – creating the rich Mid Town of today? The avenue was one of the few two way traffic ones in New York, with plants in the central reservation above the buried tracks.

Grand Central was built and owned by the Vanderbilt  family, and opened in 1871 – in the middle of very poor area surrounded by slums and slaughter houses. The area changed, and the station was totally redesigned and rebuilt between 1903 and 1913 – as ‘Terminal City’. A series of underground passages led passengers from the trains to the Yale Club and buildings such as the Biltmore, Commodore (now the Grand Hyatt), and Roosevelt Hotels. The first of the bodies in the book is found in a room at the Waldorf Astoria – opened in 1931 on the site of the Biltmore, with its own private rail track into Grand Central… a track used by Presidents and heads of government.

It is no exaggeration to say that there is a whole city beneath Grand Central – right down 10 floors to the M42 ‘not on any blueprint’ generating room that converts AC electricity into DC to power the trains. ‘Not on any blueprint’ or plan because of the fear of terrorist attack closing down the whole East Coast railroad system – years before 9/11 and recent world events. The subterranean city spreads out across many blocks both north and south of 42nd Street – and is most bizarrely ‘home’ to many otherwise homeless people known as ‘moles’ who co-exist with the other inhabitants – large rats (‘track rabbits’). They have their own ‘mayor’ and governance. A parallel world that is entered and left through gratings connecting it to the world above…

All this, as you can imagine, is the ideal – if slightly frightening and surreal – setting for a very scary novel that takes the reader deeper and deeper into the underworld and, eventually, back up onto the roof of Grand Central for its grand finale.

Grand Central run tourist tours of their facility. Very definitely on my agenda for when I am next in New York. Terminal City is a great and exciting book – and I felt I learnt a lot I did not know about a city with which I thought I was pretty familiar. An ideal book for TripFiction!

Tony for the TripFiction team

You can follow Linda Fairstein on Twitter and find out more about the Alexandra Cooper novels via her website.

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