It's a day for tripping down memory lane for my sweetheart. We are heading north out of the city to Hasting-on-Hudson, the village where he lived as a child.
First step - Grand Central Station and on the outside, Mister tells me to look up. The Graybar rats are an homage to more nautical times and the effort made to keep rats off the ships. (Hey Gwen and Frieda - remember talking about this on the cruise?) The Graybar Building, built in 1927, was designed to pay tribute to New York City’s position as a key transportation hub, with its trains (the building is right near Grand Central Terminal) and its seaport. The cables that connect the canopy in front of the exterior to the building itself are made to look like the mooring lines of a ship. And as with real mooring lines, these mooring lines have rats climbing up them, attempting to get into the “ship” that is the Graybar Building. The rats are thwarted by conical structures called baffles near the top of the lines that stop the sculpted rodents from getting all the way to the building, as they would stop rats from entering ships. At some point, the rats disappeared from their mooring lines, but during the building’s restoration in the late ’90s, a special note was made to “replace [the] missing rats.” And so there they are, once more, still unable to board the ship. The architects had one more little joke, though: The carved rosettes that the mooring lines lead to depict the heads of clever rats that, presumably, made it on board before the baffles were put in place. Kinda cool, right? Now, get those tickets purchased and find our train. Tickets were $6 a piece and we've located the right terminal.
