Grand Central's multimillion-dollar secrets

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July 12, 2010 4:00 AM PDT; by Daniel Terdiman

NEW YORK--If you want to know what the very latest tech toys are, don't go to Best Buy or an Apple Store. Go to the lost-and-found department at Grand Central Terminal.

That's because in a train terminal that services 700,000 people a day, and more than 2,000 lost items a month, those with the latest cell phones, laptops, or other tech gear are bound to lose them while at Grand Central. And there's a really good chance those people will be reunited with their hot new items.

"We start seeing technology as soon as it hits the streets," said Grand Central lost-and-found clerk Chris Stoll. "Yesterday, we had three iPhones [come in] and we've had iPads."

Added Stoll, "I've joked with customers that I'm going to start making my investments based on what comes through [the lost-and-found] window."

As part of my Road Trip 2010 project, I got a chance last week to see some of Grand Central's many hidden secrets, as well as to learn a lot about the storied terminal's past. This is a building, first opened in 1913, and fully restored in 1998, that helped keep President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's polio hidden from the American people, that has $20 million worth of precious jewels in plain site, and that to this day provides top-secret assistance to any sitting American president who comes to New York.

But more on that later.

80 percent return rate
Since most people never have any reason to interact with the folks at lost-and-found, they probably don't realize that Grand Central is home to what may be the world's most efficient system for reuniting people with their lost items.

According to Daniel Brucker, a medial relations officer in the public affairs office of the Metro-North Railroad, which today operates Grand Central, representatives from lost-and-found departments the world over come to New York to study how the folks here do it. Most such departments claim a top return rate of about 30 percent, yet Brucker said that at Grand Central, fully 80 percent of items turned in eventually find their owners.

Walking around the lost and found, it's a wonderland of cell phones, umbrellas, backpacks, laptop computers, and one inevitable item: toy train sets. Just about all these items are kept together with similar objects and are mainly stored in boxes marked, say "Cell Phones w/info June."

Brucker explained that when any item is found or turned in, clerks in lost-and-found, or personnel in the terminal, or on trains know to quickly ask a series of questions about when it was found, on which train, the train car number, and even which seat it was found in, or whether it was in an overhead bin. They also want to know what brand it is, and, say, what kind of umbrella it is.

If found on a train or in the terminal, someone will first put the item in a lockbox, and then transfer it to a police evidence bag that is locked with a padlock, before bringing it to lost and found.

The secret sauce of the department's success rate, though, is the innovative cataloging system it uses and the doggedness with which the clerks try to track down items' owners. Clerks will go through bags and purses, looking for identifying features. If there's a credit card or a driver's license in a bag, it's easy, of course, but many don't have such things. So, often, the clerks will resort to calling numbers on business cards left in jacket pockets to see if the contact knows the owner, or call the last-dialed numbers on a cell phone for the same reason.

And it's not just cell phones, purses, and jackets that turn up here. There's also artificial limbs, basset hounds, Ray Charles toys, and, of course, a great deal of technology. Indeed, Brucker said that 100 percent of laptop computers are successfully returned to their owners.

In fact, since staffers are entering great deals of salient details about found items into a computerized database, the public can now go online and enter details about items they've lost, and if there are matches, they are invited to come to lost and found and provide any final details--such as exactly what was inside that Fendi bag.

To Stoll, though, the most surprising find was probably a backpack containing 250 pairs of VIP tickets to a Dave Matthews Band concert. The bag turned out to belong to a local radio DJ who was supposed to mail the tickets to contest winners but had lost his bag. Stoll didn't get any of the tickets as a tip.

And while nearly everyone must provide details proving an item is theirs, Brucker recalled one time when that wasn't necessary. An elderly woman came in looking for her dentures, and when she saw them, she popped them in her mouth and said, "yeah, it fits." Enough said.

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