Lying forgotten two hundred feet below one of America’s most iconic buildings lies the closely guarded secret of one of America’s finest presidents - rusting away when it could be a monument to his greatness. Hidden under the Grand Central train terminal in New York lies a vast area that was unknown to the outside world until the late Eighties. It houses the power network that is responsible for the electricity that runs the entire station - and was a key target for Hitler during the Second World War. But there is also the little known Waldorf-Astoria platform, which is known by Grand Central staff as the Roosevelt Platform. And there is parked the decaying hulk of the train the four-times elected president used to hide his disability, the paralysis from the waist down which forced him to use a wheelchair in private.
In such difficult times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not want anybody to know of his own problems and arranged to journey in and out of New York via Grand Central in a personal armoured train. ‘The platform is directly under the Waldorf Astoria and after Roosevelt’s 6000 horse powered diesel train would pull up on the tracks it would let his personal car out of the side,’ said Dan Brucker, 52, spokesperson for Metro North, the company that runs Grand Central Terminal. ‘The car would then drive off the dark and secret platform into an elevator which would take it directly into the Waldorf Astoria garage. ‘This served to protect Roosevelt’s safety and protect his disability through polio from the public at large.’
Constructed as part of the redesigned terminal in 1913, this colossal top-secret area ten storeys deep - known as M42 - was left off all blueprints for the station and its existence was only officially acknowledged by the station owners in the late 1980’s. Accessible via a lift that is almost 100 years old, M42 is still one of the most closely guarded areas. The exact location of M42 is still classified information,’ said Mr Brucker. ‘Its history is one of denial and subterfuge, as you can imagine given its importance not only to New York City today but in the war effort during the 1940’s.
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