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Let There Be Grand Central Light Artistic License!
By
Jen Chung
Published Feb 20, 2008
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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By
Jen Chung
Published Feb 20, 2008
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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If you've perused the latest issue of the New Yorker, you may have noticed a rather long letter to the editor about a January cover (by Mark Ulriksen, pictured above). If you didn't, here's how the letter starts:
Mark Ulriksen’s “Winter Pleasures,”
an impressionistic rendering of Grand Central Terminal’s main concourse, depicts the famous golden clock bathed in sunlight (Cover, January 28th). Note that this can be only an eastward morning scene, not a westward afternoon. The angle of the long axis of the concourse, following that of Manhattan’s east-west streets, is not 90° but 119° east of north, and aligns with the sun through its “west” windows only from late May to early July, and then only at an elevation of less than 3°. But aren’t those the south-side ticket windows at the left of the picture, with the tracks and trains therefore on the right? And doesn’t the clock seem to read three-fifty, hardly a time for the morning sun?
You can read the rest here, after your head stops spinning.
The letter's author, though, knows what he's talking about, as he is Michael Allison, Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University and Emeritus Scientist, Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Allison does go on to surmise the illustration was "deliberately reversed" and waxes about Grand Central's lovely ceiling mural of stars, which is also reversed, but now all of us are better educated about how light streams through Grand Central.
Here are some other Grand Central Terminal New Yorker covers. Perhaps the most famous distorted New Yorker cover is Saul Steinberg's 1976 New Yorker cover.
Tagged
columbia university
grand central
grand central terminal
light
manhattan
New York City's axis
new yorker
Saul Steinberg
Space Studies
the sun
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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