It's a small space but one made all the more impressive by the presence of this glass screen. This room looks through a glass wall to Vanderbilt Hall. The portal leads to a couple rooms, including one devoted to accessories. This image also illustrates how the tables are located in relation to the context this one is on axis with the opening beyond.Ī portal at the south end of the east mezzanine (below) is a strong draw, owing to the perception of vertical movement and the white walls beyond.
But with crowds - and the employees as well, all 350 of them! - the lights fade away.Ī close-up of one of the tables (below) shows the simple and slender design of the T-shaped light fixtures, barely visible in the center of the table. These lights are a foil to the bulky yet clean-lined tables, and they create a datum of sorts that connect the various spaces together. If we leap over to the east balcony (below), the familiar Apple store tables can be seen occupying the space, most capped by slender lights at about head height. It's quite apparent that very little happens above the heads of the crowd. The top two photos are looking from the north balcony to the east balcony, from the Genius Bar to the main floor for the store. It's a great setting for a store, one that architect Bohlin Czywinski Jackson responded to with a restrained design that does very little beyond inserting furniture into the various spaces. The Verge - Retail Apple employees at a New York City store in Grand Central Terminal have started collecting signatures to form a union, according to a report from The Washington Post. It occupies the east balcony, a portion of the north balcony, and attached smaller spaces, all adjacent to the station's main concourse. Apple employees working at the New York City Grand Central Apple Store are working to form a union, with workers taking steps that could result in it being the first Apple retail outlet to unionize.
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Today, the employees were dutifully explaining these features to customers, mostly helping them download the Apple Store app on their iPhones and showing them how easy buying Apple this holiday season can be.On Friday the Apple Store in Grand Central Terminal opened. There are innovations too, including self-checkout and fulfillment (there’s an app for that) and pre-ordering (while you’re riding the rails). The store is like any other: it has the Genius Bar, training sessions, 15-minute tutorials (14.5 minutes more than most commuters allow for catching their trains) and workshops. Here you will find the Genius Bar, stretched across the terminal wall.
Through the elevator room, past a few more tables and a lot more red-shirted Apple employees, the store opens back up with more views of the great hall. The store still has all of the Apple consistency, design-wise, too, just in case you didn’t know where you were.
Apple really did do a great job at maintaining the integrity of the building. There’s no getting around the fact that the new store is simply stunning - though most of the credit should go to the beauty of the terminal itself. The only non-marbled room (through more hallways and rooms) is where all the extras, cases, hard drives, etc., are kept on their shelves. Every part of the space is used -even the corridors that connect the the balconies are filled with gadgets. Apple, as usual, kept all plans on lockdown - until this morning.ĭespite a more majestic backdrop, the store looks as any Apple store would: wood tables neatly arranged with lap tops, iPads and iPhones just as you’d expect. When Apple announced the new location, many New Yorkers were worried that the beautiful 1913 Beaux Arts building would be tainted by Apple's modern design-scheme.