The Experiment That Chose Grand Central’s Materials
In November of 1905, the New York Central Railroad did something strange. With construction on Grand Central Terminal already underway, the railroad's architects, Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore, weren't yet sure what the building's exterior should be made of so they ran a pretty straightforward endurance experiment. They placed fifteen stone samples in an open field in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, left them there through a full New York winter, and came back to see what survived. Fifteen stones went in: Granite from Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine, Marble from Connecticut, and even Limestone from Indiana. Each one labeled, documented, exposed to the same freezing temperatures, the same rain, the same pressure of a New York City's unrelenting winter. In the end, there stood only two stones worthy of selection for Grand Central Terminal's facade: Indiana limestone for the upper portion, and Stony Creek granite, from Connecticut, at the shopfront level; victory went to the most durable, not the most exotic or expensive.
That patience to run such a methodical experiment and test the quality of materials produced a building that has been a beacon of New York City’s legacy at 42nd Street for over a century. Even when the terminal underwent a decade-long restoration completed in 2004, a cleanup of the facade revealed the original limestone untarnished beneath years of accumulated residue.
Why Indiana Limestone Came to Define New York’s Skyline
The choice by architects such as Reed & Steem, Warren & More, and even Robert A. M. Stern, who earned the nickname "Limestone Jesus," to rely on these enduring materials is responsible for the visual identity of New York City as we know it today. The Empire State Building features over 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone and was completed in 1931, while the same material was chosen to armor Rockefeller Center, and the Waldorf Astoria. What made Indiana limestone so special is it being sedimentary rock formed from the compressed skeletons of marine organisms over millions of years. It is then quarried from southern Indiana, cut and shipped and set into the faces of the buildings that made Midtown look the way it does now. It is, by nature, a material with memory that only gets harder as it ages. Once it was proven superior, it became hard to choose another material to adorn the exterior of these structures.
Why Brass Was Chosen for the Spaces People Frequent
Where limestone spoke to permanence and civic weight, brass was chosen for what it did to the people passing through these monumental structures. Fixtures like ornate light sconces, vintage elevator doors, and decorative grills in buildings like the Chrysler feature streamlined Art Deco motifs, with chrome and brass finishes that catch every bit of light and creative character. Once again we find deliberate choices made by architects who understood that a lobby experienced every day, over decades, had to hold up under the weight of time without sacrificing the delightful experience granted to guests when they were first designed. The beauty of brass, unlike painted metal or plated alloys, is it doesn't deteriorate under use; it develops a patina that deepens the character of the place it inhabits and adds a personal signature thanks to every hand that touches it.
Why Brooklyn Brownstones Still Feel Better to Live in
These iconic monuments were never meant to be precious. In the mid-to-late 19th century, brownstone quarried primarily from the Portland Brownstone quarries in Connecticut were chosen in the same lineage of Indiana Limestone: it was workable, abundant, and durable enough for a city that would become an empire in its own right. It could be easily cut into beautiful facades that define entire neighborhoods, while still holding up against weather, use, and pollution; what began as practical material once again became a defining visual language for the city.
Walk down a block of brownstones in Brooklyn, whether you're talking Park Slope, The Stuy, Cobble Hill, or Fort Greene, and you can't help but to imagine yourself living in a New York fantasy sculpted by iconic material. There's something about the alchemy of symmetry, greenery, and the beautiful shades of red, violet, tan, and chocolate undertones that make up the facades of the homes around you that pull you out of the "real world," thrusts you into one where the life you've always wanted to live is at your finger tips, and the home itself becomes an anthology of your adventures. The edges of your stoops soften, worn down by decades of footsteps from groceries being carried in, conversations held on the way out, and the quiet repetition of daily life etching itself into the surface. Your iron railings oxidize slowly. Nothing is forced into a fixed state of perfection. Everything is allowed to change, yet remain exactly who they are at its core.
That's what people respond to when they see the brownstone and experience these materials first hand, whether they know how to articulate it or not. It's not just the proximity, the density, or even the history of the city that get's expressed even in the abstract. But it's the sense that the environment of New York was intentionally designed to absorb time without losing the magic of its form, even over a century later.
What New York’s Architecture Teaches About Choosing Materials
This is the same discipline that shaped this grand city at every scale. The argument these materials collectively make is that any investment in choosing materials that improve with time rather than degrade because of it is well worth it. The architects of the Gilded Age and the Art Deco era were building with aesthetics in mind as well as building for a city they believed would outlast them, and they chose materials equal to that ambition.
At Residence Supply, we make the same wager, just at a different scale than Grand Central Station. The Historical Collection was designed around the same principle: aged brass that deepens with use, blown, ribbed glass that holds and bends light the way those pre-war windows do, and the architectural proportions paid to objects whose value compounds rather than diminishes as they age. The New York Central Railroad team left fifteen stones in the Bronx for a winter to find the ones worth building with. We ask ourselves the same question, but with a slight tweak: what fixture or hardware for your home, in twenty years, will still be worth keeping?
The answer, as the greatest city in the world proves, is whatever we build with the right materials.