When the Grand Central Partnership was established to help manage the area around the storied rail station, the sidewalks were home to many homeless, graffiti stained Art Deco buildings in the area and litter covered the streets.

Many of these problems began to decrease within a few years, with the Partnership becoming an anchor for revitalization in the area.

Anchored by Grand Central Terminal, with East 54th Street to the north, Second Avenue to the east, Fifth Avenue to the west and East 36th Street to the south, these boundaries roughly make up the area maintained by the Grand Central Partnership, a district which, at over 76 million square feet of commercial space, is one of the largest districts of its kind in the United States.

Alfred Cerullo, who has been president of the Grand Central Partnership since 1999, credits the organization with substantially improving the local economic climate by giving the city a solid foundation to attract businesses. The BID has been able to operate without worrying about the budgetary shortfalls, since businesses in the area tax themselves a specified fee and use that fund to pay for upkeep.

“We have our team of public safety workers, sweepers, sanitation and managers continuously out there,” Cerullo said. “We manage our organization within the budget so that we can maintain services in the business district effectively.”

The Grand Central Partnership is currently working on two major projects that they hope to unveil in permanent scale in the upcoming months.

In order to help people successfully walk throughout the neighborhood, the Partnership is planning to install plaques in the sidewalk to act as visual compasses. They have been working with the city for more than a year to get final approval.

The project even caught the attention of David Letterman, who turned the plaques into a punch line.

“Having the plaques mentioned on the Letterman Top Ten list really brought attention to the project,” Cerullo said. “We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about them and people in the neighborhood really enjoy them”.

Noreen Tomassi, executive director of the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, a 188-year-old literary organization in the district, first collaborated with the Grand Central Partnership for film and reading events last year and appreciates the organization’s outreach.

“This area is dominated by many larger businesses and it’s easy to feel small, so us working with the partnership has only increased visibility for our organization events”, Tomassi said.

A public plaza program is also being developed in the district to occupy a space between 41st and 42nd Streets.

The Partnership has spent over $32 million in capital improvements in the business district, upgrading street lighting, cleaning up newspaper boxes, installing new benches and setting up dedicated bike areas to encourage alternative transit. Cerullo, a member of the City Planning Commission and a former Council member in Staten Island, said the organization focused on green building before most cities had even thought about investing in environmentally conscious projects.

“We set a vision for what the neighborhood could become and knew that with the strong commitment from property owners and residents, progress could be made,” Cerullo said.