![]() ![]() The Grand Central Art Galleries and School of Art in 1923. Having attended this tour ourselves, we know there was only one person who had access to these locations - Dan Brucker. Davis does not mention Brucker by name in the acknowledgements (his tours were for years a well-kept secret amongst New York City insiders), but she writes about going on an architectural hard hat tour leaving from the stationmaster’s office that included the glass walkways and track 61 underneath the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where Franklin D. There is even a scene involving the secret interior staircase that goes from the information booth in the atrium to the one below, rarely seen by the public. Reference is made to the attempted destruction of the M42 basement by Nazi spies, one of Brucker’s favorite stories that he would tell atop one of the remaining rotaries in the basement deep below Grand Central. The locations revealed in the The Masterpiece align with those seen on the famous off-limits tours once led by Dan Brucker, former manager of tours at Grand Central Terminal including the inside the Tiffany clock, the whispering gallrery, and the glass walkways. Readers will be excited to see that the battle to landmark Grand Central figures heavily in the novel (as well as why it must be called terminal not station!). Poking around the terminal, Virginia discovers the artwork of Clara Darden and begins on a quest that will transcend time. In 1974, Virginia Clay is a recent divorcée in dire financial straits and has taken a job in the information booth at the crumbling Grand Central Terminal as Penn Central railroad is attempting to get the building demolished. Clara Darden is an aspiring illustrator and teacher at the Grand Central School of Art in 1928, fighting to make it in a man’s world as the Great Depression looms. The Masterpieceis a page turner (we finished the 350 page novel in less than a day) and tells a riveting story of two women in New York, separated by nearly half a century. ![]() The Grand Central School of Art, which enrolled 900 students at its peak, count notable artists like Arshile Gorky, Daniel Chester French, Willem de Kooning, and Norman Rockwell as alumni and teachers. The art school was an offshoot of the Grand Central Art Galleries, founded the year prior by a collective of artists that included John Singer Sargent, Walter Leighton Clark and Edmund Greacen. Established in 1923, the Grand Central School of Art was located on the sixth floor of Grand Central Terminal on the western side. Thanks to a starring role in the bestselling novel, The Masterpieceby Fiona Davis, the lost Grand Central School of Art has returned to the limelight. ![]()
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