God in Grand Central Station

By Nita Prelvukaj

“Beauty may be said to be gods trade mark in creation”. With deep rich green blue colors and images of the Gods watching down on grand central, one cannot help but feel the presence of the beauty as the work of god. Thousands of people walk through Grand Central Station on commute every morning. I spent a year walking in and out of trains, shops and restaurants in Grand Central Station never fully looking up to admire the Celestial Ceiling. I take the 6 train to work and back home never fully looking up. New York is a fast city and Grand Central is a blur as we bolt through our day.
 Decorated by artist Paul Helleu in 1912, the Celestial Ceiling at Grand Central Station features a motif of the zodiac. This design is famously inverted: some say because Helleu was inspired by a medieval manuscript showing the heavens, as they would be seen from outside celestial sphere.
 Beecher said, “We all need not go to old Rome and Athens to find the beautiful.” Greece and Athens are right here! The mural of the gods on the celestial ceiling is an accessible beauty to all who pass by. It watches the poor beggars who sit on its floors asking for money, the musicians who sing at its crevices, and those who scurry quickly down the halls.
 At the glory days of Athens and Greece, no man except the king and the priest was rich enough to have a picture in his house. Art belonged to the king- the government and the priest – the church. It was for the privileged of society. The great masses knew nothing of it. It was to them “something like the stars that they might worship, but did not belong to them”. The celestial sky belongs to all the New Yorkers of New York City.   

Image of the Celestial Ceiling

The constellations appear in reverse from how they would appear looking at the night sky. This is the night sky from the view of God, the presence of God in our New York City lives and the beauty that Henry Ward Beecher allowed into our home and I am fortunate to call a place like New York home. 

“There is an essential unity in all forms of the beautiful. It will not do to object the art, to embellish it of dress and furniture”. The celestial ceiling is hidden, hardly even noticeable. If it caught your attention, chances are twenty commuters almost knocked you over as they whisked by. We much understand the relations of God’s kingdom on earth to immortality. God’s immortality lives through the ceiling in its artistic beauty. The presence of this mural makes the soul of man more powerful.