Skip to main content

Grand Central

     Before Covid Grand Central was always booming with people, LIRR workers, train conductors, business people, tourists and more. Stepping into Grand Central now is a very different vibe then before. There are no longer crowds of people. The dining hall is empty with many iconic stores that used to be there before closed, the infamous clock tower no longer has groups of people trying to take photos in front of it. The apple store is empty, the ticket holders seem bored, and the homelessness issue seems to have grow immensely. 

    One of the biggest shocks for me was that the transit store was closed. When I was a kid I would go to the transit store every Christmas with my family. My eyes would light up at the toy trains dusted in fake snow, and my brother and I would push through the crowds to get the best looking spot. It was really hard to see the store closed, it honestly made me emotional.  

Another big change that I noticed was how many stores closed in the dining hall. The dining hall used to be one of the most lively places in Grand Central, there were lines at almost every store and it was almost impossible to find a seat to eat your food at. To our shock most of the stores were closed, including shake shack which was a huge shock. To eat your food you had to stand at one designated area that a security worker stood in front of.

One of the only things that felt the same was the grocery store section that has things like, a fish market, murray's cheese, fresh produce and more. Not a single store in the market had closed and it lots of people were inside buying produce. 

One cool thing we saw in Grand Central was a mask vending machine by the train tracks. It had masks, hand sanitizer, and chargers. We had never seen a mask vending machine before, so it was cool to see interesting things people are doing in regards to covid.

Overall, Grand Central seems to have changed the most out of the places we have visited so far. Hopefully things will open back up inside and it can go back to the iconic place it used to be.









Comments

  1. KaraApril 30, 2021 at 5:42 PM

    Wow! It seems so empty! I guess I haven't been there since Covid started either. It will be interesting to see how quickly things start to move back in once the city "opens" this summer.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Critical reflection 3

Overall, we have done a good job making sure that our work related back to our essential question of “how has the culture in NYC changed throughout the pandemic?” The approach that we have taken is different than what I originally expected we would do. While we have been sticking to our plan and interviewing people who contribute to the culture of the city, we have also been making very many visual observations. We have noticed things such as changed rules at businesses and the amount of people visiting those businesses. One challenge that we faced, mainly while we were uptown in Harlem, was getting people to agree to talk to us. Many businesses such as whole foods explained that they could not answer any questions because of strict management rules. Other street vendors just simply did not want conversation or to answer questions. This was disappointing but we understood that it would not work out every time.  So far, we have learned that the culture has changed and not necessaril...
Post a Comment
Read more

Museum Of Natural History

 We visited the Museum of Natural History on a cold and rainy day. We walked through a pretty flower garden on the way in and everything had just started blooming. Acadia and I noticed a statue of a man in the garden that neither of us had ever noticed before on prior visits. We talked about how this project has allowed us to notice so many small details in New York City that we had not seen before even though both if us have lived here for a very long time. After reserving a time to come in, they had us pay what we wanted to for admission because we are NYC residents. They took our temperature at the door. The lobby was basically empty except for two staff members. As we walked toward more popular exhibits like the giant whale and room with all the mammals the 'crowds' were a bit larger. I put crowds in air quotes because compared to the normal crowds at the museum, they were much smaller. One exhibit that was fully closed because of covid is the butterfly exhibit. They also d...
Post a Comment
Read more