Bronx youth remembered at Grand Central.

I recently learned of two secrets in Grand Central Station: the Whispering Wall and the Hammers of Hell. The Whispering Wall was fascinating and worth chasing down. Not so, Hammers of Hell.

For generations of Bronxites, Grand Central Station has been the gateway to the city. The 4 train and Metro-North run through the Bronx, and the most common destination on those lines is the terminal. As a child, my father would bring us down there and give us a tour of the station. To me it was the center of the city, and still is. Grand Central and Rockefeller Center are two of the few places in New York that have the same flavor today as they did when I was a child. There is something comforting about the reliability of these great monuments.

Grand Central Terminal has been on 42nd St. in different guises since 1869. Construction on what we know as Grand Central Station?technically Grand Central Terminal since trains originate and end there?began in 1903 and was completed in 1913 at a cost of $43 million. The Beaux-Arts building was a magnificent feat in architecture, and the statue of Hermes on the facade and the huge clock inside the terminal became touchstones of a romantic and dashing New York.

By the 1960s, the terminal had fallen into disrepair, and plans were made to tear it down. Were it not for New York swells like Jackie Kennedy, who pitched a bitch over losing the building, it would have been replaced. Though technically saved?and the drive to preserve it as a landmark was underway?not much was done in the way of repair, and Grand Central became a urinal. This lasted into the 1990s.

I recently met up with former Bronxite Mike Connor, 46, who has worked as a carpenter for more than 20 years and has been using the terminal for decades. He shares my fascination with the station.

"When I was in high school in the Bronx and we'd cut because of snow, we'd always jump on the train and wind up down in Grand Central. It just seemed like the place to go. Even now when I meet my kids, we meet up at the station. They know all of New York, but it is the place we usually pick."

Connor took me to what he called the Whispering Wall, a marble double arch on the lower level in front of the Oyster Bar. He told me to face the wall, then walked across the arch to the other side.

"How you doing?"

Connor was 20 feet away?and also facing a wall?but he sounded right behind me.

"Pretty wild, huh?"

The arch is built with terra cotta tiles, and you can whisper on any wall and hear it on the other walls. In Connor's words, "a mosquito's fart would be heard on the other side."

As a teen, Connor told me, he went to a Grateful Dead concert and before heading home, he strolled around the station. He was, as he put it, in a state of being "molecularly modified." Tripping on acid.

"When you're under that kind of influence," he recalled, "Grand Central is really intriguing. Just the humanity."

He wandered the station and slowed down as he saw a group of chatting tourists standing outside the Oyster Bar under the arch.

"When I leaned on the marble, it was like the walls were talking to me. It weirded me out."

As we passed through the main room, Connor told me of sneaking into the catwalks above the station and standing above the stars on the ceiling mural. We also talked about what a terrible mess the place was in the 1970s and 80s.

"I never knew how every bum knew to come to Grand Central," Connor said. "I figured that, like me, they just dug the place. Then I was dating a girl whose father was a sergeant for the Middletown police department in Connecticut. That town had an insane asylum or mental hospital or whatever politically correct term there is for those places... Whenever someone got out of the place, they were driven to a train station on the Metro-North line and given a one-way ticket to Grand Central.

"I figure a lot of hospitals did that, and that was how they all wound up in the city."

Later, as we sat at the bar, Connor told me about the Hammers of Hell.

"That's what I called the bathroom that was on the lower level. I used to go to a bar in Grand Central called Pete Smith's Hall of Fame. It is a boutique now or something. Anyway, Pete Smith's had no bathroom."

We laughed over the insanity of filling people with liquor and not giving them a place to relieve themselves.

"If you had to go, you had to use the bathroom on the lower level. You would walk in and have to wait for a urinal because all the stalls were taken up by men jerking off. I mean, it was just unbelievable. Guys would be hammering away and no one cared. If I really had to go I would yell, 'Okay, that can wait. I gotta piss.' You can't fathom that scene happening now."

That restroom became known as the Hammers of Hell, and Connor laughed as he told me about taking tourists into the station and letting them wander into the Hammers of Hell. None of them wanted to go back.

During the 1990s, a drive to clean up the terminal resulted in a Grand Central reborn, and that pristine state survives, hopefully giving a new generation of memories to a new generation of kids from the Bronx on their way into Manhattan as they skip school on a snowy day.