Grand Central Terminal. Seven hundred and fifty thousand people pass through here every day. On holidays, a million. It has forty-four platforms — more than any train station on earth — sixty-seven tracks, and a main concourse roughly three-quarters the size of a football field.
And the ceiling is wrong.
Look up. Twenty-five hundred stars in gold leaf on a blue-green sky. Constellations. Zodiac signs. Gorgeous. And completely backwards. West is east. East is west. The whole thing is reversed. A commuter noticed less than two months after the terminal opened in February nineteen thirteen. And here's what probably happened: the astronomer, Doctor Harold Jacoby, gave the painter a star chart. The painter, Charles Basing, put the chart on the floor instead of holding it overhead. Copied it from the wrong orientation. And nobody caught it until the public did.
There IS a more generous explanation — that it's the medieval tradition of showing the sky from God's perspective, looking inward
at the celestial sphere from the outside. But between God's perspective and a guy who put a map on the floor, I know which one I believe.
Now here's a detail that's smaller but somehow better. See that ceiling? In the nineteen nineties, it was so filthy that you couldn't see any of the stars. Decades of grime. Everyone assumed it was cigarette smoke, because, well — you used to be able to smoke
