The painted sky over Grand Central is wrong, and nobody fixed it

Tip your head back in the Main Concourse and you’re looking at a green October sky stitched with gold constellations. Look a little harder and it’s wrong. The whole zodiac runs backwards, as if you were staring down at the heavens from outside instead of up from a train platform. People have argued for a century about whether it was a mistake or a god’s-eye view on purpose. Either way, nobody ever turned it around.

The terminal opened at 12:01 in the morning on February 2, 1913, and more than 150,000 people came through on opening day just to see it. For decades the great trains left from right under that ceiling, the Twentieth Century Limited and the Water-Level Limited rolling out toward Chicago.

Then it nearly didn’t make it. In 1968 the railroad’s leaseholders floated a 55-story tower by architect Marcel Breuer that would have torn out the main waiting room and chewed into the Concourse itself. What saved it was a fight, and an unlikely general: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who along with writer Brendan Gill threw herself into the cause. The city had named the place a landmark back in 1967, the railroad sued, and the case ground on for nearly ten years before the building came through whole. By December 1976 it was a National Historic Landmark.

So the backwards stars are still up there, still wrong, still gorgeous. A near-miss with the wrecking ball, and the one flaw nobody had the heart to correct. Next time you’re rushing for a train, give yourself ten seconds and look up.