The construction of a new Grand Central Terminal between 1903 and 1913 involved the creation of a double-level track-and-platform system that, with its associated yards and other facilities, occupied an underground area bounded by 42nd and 50th streets, Lexington Avenue, and a line between Vanderbilt and Madison avenues. Every building in this area is built atop Grand Central’s facilities, and many of them consequently lack basements. Yet elevator buildings require basements for elevator pits. Thus for these buildings the ground floor becomes the de facto basement, and one must ascend one floor to the elevators. Such is the case with the last and northernmost of the buildings that rose in the “New York Central air-rights development” of the 1910s and 1920s.

This is the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The Waldorf became famous long before its building went up in the block bounded by Park and Lexington avenues and 49th and 50th streets. The original Waldorf was built in the 1890s on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th streets, the site now occupied by the Empire State Building. The new Waldorf opened in 1931. Its architects were Schultze & Weaver.

Leonard Schultze had earlier worked for Warren & Wetmore. He held the title of chief of design when that firm collaborated with Reed & Stem on Grand Central Terminal. Warren & Wetmore went on to design several of the important buildings of the vast air-rights development, including the New York Central Building (still intact), the Hotel Marguery (demolished), and the Biltmore Hotel (altered beyond recognition).

By the late 1920s, the classical forms of the earlier buildings had begun to yield to “modernistic” forms. (Architects of the time never used the term “Art Deco.”) What remained was a commitment to ornamental richness. The Waldorf’s limestone exterior is notable mainly for its twin towers on the skyline. The richness lies within, in the majestic through block second floor, comprising two lobbies reached by stairs or escalators from the avenues.

The two lobbies strike very different notes, yet both are clearly Deco. The eastern lobby is dark-toned with amazing black-and-gold marble columns and ebony walls. In the center is an ornate clock from the 1890s. The western lobby, though, is for me the more thrilling. Here we find the brightness and airiness characteristic of the early 1920s; gilt-trimmed beige backgrounds set off vividly colored ornaments, such as Louis Rigal’s marvelous floor mosaic. A raised terrace along the Park Avenue wall serves as a piano lounge.

The legendary rail siding below the hotel was, according to the indefatigable researcher Joseph Brennan, not built for the hotel, but left over from the powerhouse once on the site. The hotel built a freight elevator accessible to that siding, but the notion that this was the “presidential siding” is apocryphal. No evidence exists that FDR or any other president ever used it.

The Waldorf was a fitting finale to “Terminal City,” the city’s greatest ensemble of buildings, before its tragic dismantling in the 1950s and 1960s.