Grand Central Holiday Fair Opens Monday in Vanderbilt Hall — 38 Booths, Free Entry, Through Christmas Eve

The holiday season gets its first indoor address on Monday. The Grand Central Holiday Fair opens November 9 in Vanderbilt Hall inside Grand Central Terminal, at 89 East 42nd Street, and runs through Christmas Eve, December 24 — with 38 artisan booths and free entry, no tickets needed. The fair is the city's longest-running indoor holiday market: Grand Central first opened it in 1993, designing an indoor refuge for commuters, locals and visitors looking for genuine craftsmanship rather than mass-produced trinkets, and it has returned to the hall off the main concourse every season since.

The hours for the first stretch are set. From November 9 through December 16 the fair is open Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and it is closed on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 26. Its position inside the terminal makes it the one holiday market a New Yorker can work into a commute rather than a trip: a gift run between trains, indoors, out of the weather that the rest of the market season — Bryant Park's Winter Village is already open — asks shoppers to stand in.

For Midtown, the fair's opening is also the starting gun. It is the first of the season's big markets to open its doors, in the terminal that funnels more daily foot traffic past its booths than any street market can draw, and it runs the full six-plus weeks to Christmas Eve. Monday's opening hours are 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; the fair's own listings are the check before a late visit, as holiday-week hours change later in December.