The Catcher in the Rye

Having got himself thrown out of yet another prep school, Holden Caulfield spends two lost days drifting around Manhattan before he has to face his parents. The city is precisely his: Grand Central where he sleeps on a bench, the frozen pond in Central Park where he keeps wondering where the ducks go, the unchanging dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and the carousel where his sister Phoebe rides in the rain at the end.

Holden Caulfield

Grand Central Terminal

Chapter 20

Grand Central is where the city takes Holden in and where it lets him down. He rides in from Pencey, and after his money and his nerve run out he sleeps here among the strangers, waking cold and low and more alone than at any point in the book.

Chapters 20-21

explicit Holden arrives in Manhattan by train and, later, out of money and nowhere to go, spends part of a night sleeping on a bench in the waiting room at Grand Central, the real terminal on 42nd Street.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Holden Caulfield

The Central Park lagoon (the ducks)

Chapter 20

The question he keeps asking cab drivers, where the ducks go when the pond freezes over, is Holden's small, unanswered way of asking what happens to the vulnerable when their world closes in. He finds the half-frozen pond in the dark and stands there, half-hoping he might get pneumonia.

Chapter 20

explicit Holden goes looking for the pond in the south-east corner of Central Park to see whether the ducks are still there in the cold; the Pond is a real feature of the park.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗