You may recall the old Grand Central Station. It was no mean terminal. Commodore Vanderbilt built it himself soon after the close of the Civil War. The passenger business of the railroads of the land was then beginning to be a considerable thing. Americans were gaining the travel habit. The genus commuter had been born. The first of the railroad Vanderbilts saw all these things. And, because he had the fine gift of vision, he turned his far-seeing toward action. On Forty-second Street--then a struggling crossroad at the back of New York--he erected the greatest railroad terminal in the world. It was indeed a giant structure, and the biggest of our American towns had, in its Grand Central depot, a toy over which it might brag for many and many a day. New York was in genuine ecstasy about it. Its ornate and graceful train shed spanned thirteen tracks, and even if our fathers did wonder where all the cars could come from to fill so spacious an apartment they had to marvel at its beauty. And beyond this creation of the artist was the creation of the engineer--the huge switching yard, black and interlaced with steel tracks. It was a mightily congested railroad yard; upon its tight-set edges the growing city pressed. Skyscrapers sprang up roundabout and looked down upon the cars and locomotives. The value of that land, given as a switching yard for a passenger terminal, eventually was reckoned close to $100,000,000. And the yard itself became a black barrier to the development of the heart of metropolitan New York. * * * * * In forty years from the day it was opened, the last vestige of the Grand Central depot, a building which, to a considerable portion of the population of this land, had been second in fame only to the Capitol at Washington, was gone. Workmen had torn it stone from stone and brick from brick and carted it off as waste to scrap yards. The majesty of that lovely vaulted train shed had been reduced to a pile of rusty and useless iron. It had been outgrown and discarded.