Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center Station

The Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center station (formerly Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street station) is a New York City Subway station complex shared by the BMT Fourth Avenue Line, the BMT Brighton Line and the IRT Eastern Parkway Line, located at Atlantic, Fourth, and Flatbush Avenues and Pacific Street in Downtown Brooklyn. The complex is served by the 2, 4, D, N, Q and R trains at all times; the 3 train at all times except late nights; the 5 and B trains during weekdays; and a few rush-hour W trains.

As of 2019, it is the busiest subway station in Brooklyn, with 13,939,794 passengers, and is ranked 20th overall. The control house has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980, while the station complex as a whole has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2004, and is ADA-compliant.

History

The IRT Eastern Parkway Line station was built first, in 1908, the terminal of a four-stop subway extension from Lower Manhattan to Downtown Brooklyn via the Joralemon Street Tunnel. The station's control house, a grand, ornate entrance to what was then the terminal of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company's Brooklyn lines, was designed by Heins & LaFarge, who also built the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, Manhattan. This control house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980; however, the actual entrance is now removed and now serves as a skylight into the IRT station.

To address overcrowding, in 1909, the New York Public Service Commission proposed lengthening platforms at stations along the original IRT subway. As part of a modification to the IRT's construction contracts, made on January 18, 1910, the company was to lengthen station platforms to accommodate ten-car express and six-car local trains. In addition to $1.5 million (equivalent to $ million in ) spent on platform lengthening, $500,000 () was spent on building additional entrances and exits. It was anticipated that these improvements would increase capacity by 25 percent. The island platform at the Atlantic Avenue station on the modern Eastern Parkway Line was extended to the east. On January 23 and 24, 1911, ten-car express trains began running.

The city government took over the BMT's operations on June 1, 1940, and the IRT's operations on June 12, 1940. During the 1964–1965 fiscal year, the Brighton Line platforms at Atlantic Avenue, along with those at six other stations on the Brighton Line, were lengthened to 615 feet to accommodate a ten-car train of 60-foot IND cars, or a nine-car train of 67-foot BMT cars.

The station was overhauled in the late 1970s. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) fixed the station's structure and overhauled its appearance. It refurbished the wall tilings and replaced the old signs and incandescent lighting with modern fixtures. It also fixed the staircases and platform edges. On January 16, 1978, the ex-IRT and ex-BMT stations were connected into a single station complex, eliminating a "double fare" that formerly was required to transfer between the Atlantic Avenue IRT/BMT platforms and the Fourth Avenue BMT side of the station.

The station complex underwent another major overhaul from 1999 to 2003, using funds from the 1987 capital program; the $49 million in funding from that program had been delayed in 1994 due to the MTA's budget issues. This time the station received state of the art repairs and was updated for ADA-accessibility, with the installation of eight elevators in the station, as well as the widening or construction of fifteen staircases. The MTA repaired the staircases, re-tiled the walls and floors, upgraded the station's lights and the public address system, installed ADA yellow safety threads along the platform edge, installed new trackbeds for local and express trains entering the IRT station, and widened the 100-year-old passageways between the stations. An escalator was replaced at Hanson Place, the kiosk on Times Plaza was rehabilitated, and a new station entrance was added at Hanson Place. To achieve this, the entire IRT station had to be supported by large crossbeams hanging from the roof of the station box, a construction technique that had never been used previously; the station was also supported by conventional columns from below. The entire feat raised the subway infrastructure under Flatbush Avenue, as well as the avenue itself, by less than an inch while the passageways were widened from . In 2004, the entire station was made a NRHP landmark. Late that year, the MTA installed elevators on both sides of the platform and street level to accommodate wheelchairs and those with disabilities.

In June 2009, the MTA sold the naming rights of the station complex to Forest City Ratner Companies for 20 years at $200,000 per year, one of the few such renames in the system ( Willets Point–Shea Stadium, in Queens, was another example of a station with such naming rights, until the MTA simply renamed it to Mets–Willets Point following Shea Stadium

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases