A boom in commercial business at Grand Central Terminal, which brought in a record $160.4 million in sales last year, bodes well for commercial success at several transit hubs now being developed, according to real estate analysts and transit officials.

The floodlighted Grand Central Terminal, once the dingy, dimly lit home of Dollar Bill’s dollar store, O’Henry’s photo film developing, and the Griddle Shop, has been transformed into a bustling commercial hub with 103 higher-end retail outlets such as Aveda, L’Occitane, an elegant lingerie store, Pink Slip, and several high-end restaurants. About 90% of commercial tenants at the train station reported that 2006 sales were up from the previous year.

“For the most part, the commuters have blinders on,” the general manager of the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal, Garvey Michael, said. “Our customers are a pretheater crowd, some bridge and tunnel, and a lot of Europeans, ready to spend a lot of money.” Last year the Oyster Bar brought in $14.2 million in sales, a record for the seafood restaurant, which has been operating at the rail hub since 1912.

Metro-North Railroad, which operates Grand Central Terminal, receives between 6% and 10% of each tenant’s sales, which it uses to help fund the commuter railroad and maintain the station.

Across Midtown from Grand Central Terminal, the much-maligned Pennsylvania Station is failing to attract shoppers to its corridors of low-end retail outlets. Commuters who use the hub tend to enter and exit the station as quickly as possible, rarely dallying to shop if they don’t have to.

With the help of a government subsidy, two developers are planning to remake Penn Station and the Farley Post Office building across Eighth Avenue into a lighter, more spacious transit hub that could accommodate high-end retail shops similar to those at Grand Central Terminal.

Transit officials and retailers are also hoping that two transit hubs under construction in Lower Manhattan could become commercial destinations in a neighborhood that, while bustling with business activity, is underserved by retail vendors.

“The base of the World Trade Center before 9/11 was a high density of retail space that residential occupants depended on for banking, bookstores, and different residential services,” a real estate appraiser, Jonathan Miller, said.

Much of that space has not yet been replaced, he said, leaving a gaping retail hole in the neighborhood. Both the Fulton Street Transit Center, where 24,000 square feet of retail space is under construction, and the Santiago Calatrava-designed World Trade Center Transportation Hub, where the Port Authority is constructing 200,000 square feet of retail space that is expected to open in 2009, could help to fill the void.

“What really drives the sales per square foot is the volume of foot traffic and the income of those feet,” the managing director of Real Capital Analytics, Daniel Fasulo, said. The Fulton Street Transit Center, which would connect 12 train lines with the PATH railroad when completed, is already being used by about 275,000 riders a day. The World Trade Center Transportation Hub, just a few blocks to the west, is expected to serve 400,000 passengers a day when completed, a Port Authority spokesman said.

The goal, transit officials said, is to create destination points that are appealing even to New Yorkers who are not in transit.