“Apple is reported to have paid $5 million to Metrazur Restaurant to buy out the eight years remaining on its Grand Central Terminal lease,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“Apple, judging from a tour of the new retail store it has built on the terminal’s east and north balconies — in more than twice the space formerly occupied by Metrazur — is going to move a lot of product when the store opens Friday at 10 a.m.. (Free T-shirts for the first 4,000 customers),” P.E.D. reports. “The store has: 2 Genius Bars with 12 seats each, 45 display tables covered with Macs, iPads, iPhones and iPods, 3 walls of accessories, [and] 315 full and part-time employees (bringing NYC’s total to more than 4,000).”
Read more in the full article here.
Wow! Apple has done it again.
They will need to hang some fabric banners from the ceilings to break up the sound. The noise is quite loud now, before all the customers show up. Once you pop 1000 people in there, you won’t be able to hear much. Sound breaking or wall mounted deflector boards would help 100%
I wouldn’t be surprised if this weren’t necessary when large masses of people start mingling around. People absorb sound very effectively (better than any fabric banners). I doubt the noise issue will become an issue at all.
Cool. So, when MS set up their shop next to Apple store at the site, they will need lots of fabric banners or active noise cancellation speakers?
jeez Louise.
A store befitting the largest company of the world.
Ballmy, try to clone that you gas bag.
That is huge! So, will Microsoft try to match by putting one of their lonely stores in a subway stop? Probably one of those lame ones too that is half outside. LOL.
No room left on the mezzanine, but Microsoft could lower a painter’s scaffold from the balcony—a new form factor (take that, Apple!); and big enough to hold any inventory they’d be likely to sell.
People might visit the Microsoft stores if they placed concerts there.
I misread “subway stop” as “Subway shop”…. not sure which one is funnier. They both have benefits. One you can get a snack when you leave disappointed. The other you can leave quickly.
For a company with such a slim product lineup, that’s insane, eh? The floor layout seems strange. Does it wrap around the central hall?
It wraps three quarters of the way around. Lots and lots and lots and lots of space and space and space and…. Hmm.
Is there any gate or door for Apple GCT store where the stair case leading up to the store? I don’e one in the video.
Yes, there’s a massive marble staircase at the Eastern side of the concourse that leads up to the store. I was there Thanksgiving day and took a few photos of the construction barrier.
It’s a phenomenal space, although the side rooms are kind of weird.
The side rooms remind me of the basement of a church, not an Apple Store. Sigh.
The sides rooms have some similitude (style, marble and cavernous) with the basement rooms of the parisian Apple Store near the Opera, This basement was in part, with some security and clerk rooms and the vault of an old bank built during the same time of Grand Central. But the Grand Central Apple store itself is much much bigger than the Opera one.
But I thing the cost of the parisian leasing is not very differentat last from the bigger new yorker one……
Icon, meet icon!
Kudos to Apple, sign of real progress. Steve’s smiling 😉
Sorry kids but I’m kind of concerned about the future of this venture. It doesn’t look or feel like an Apple Store. It looks and feels and sounds like a noisy train station. I’m a New Yawker and this will not be my choice of Apple stores. But I hope it is a great success nonetheless.
Derek, when you move to the Westchester (I know, right?) and have to commute through GCT every day, I promise it’ll be your favorite place to shop.
I want to live there.
That’s quite a store. All that was missing were the cocktails at the Genius Bar! Looks like they didn’t know what to do with all the space, so they filled it up with MacBooks and iPads;)