Preservation Online: Story of the Week Archives: Underground Secrets

From Preservation Online, the online magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

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Underground Secrets
Inside New York's First and Most Ornate Subway Station, Closed Since 1945

Story from the archives by Janet Sassi / Aug. 31, 2007

On a hot, clammy afternoon last year, a cluster of eclectic New Yorkers gathered on a downtown subway platform. They waited for instructions from Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) employees in day-glow orange vests. Even though the platform was known to be the end of the Number Six subway line, the group knew one more station platform lay beyond. It is one of New York's smallest hidden gems, an abandoned subway station known affectionately within the MTA as "the jewel in the crown."

Located on the short loop of utility track that Number Six trains use to turn around and head uptown again, New York City's very first subway station, officially named the Old City Hall Station, opened in 1904 and closed in 1945. Last year, for the first time in several years, the MTA's New York Transit Museum received the green light from city officials to conduct members-only tours of the station, whose location underneath City Hall has made it an off-limits security concern for years.

"This was meant to be the showpiece station of the whole system," says Gabrielle Shubert, the museum's director. "Since it was at City Hall, the mayor himself made sure the design elements that went into it were exquisite."

Even in it present state of disrepair, the splendor of the Old City Hall Station remains. The 400-foot-long station sits on a graceful curve of track, a shape that inspires the design motif for the entire station. Above the tracks, interspersed between 15 cathedral-like timbrel vaults, are three curved leaded-glass skylights that filter natural light into the station. The platform is further lit by 12 old electric chandeliers, their once-gleaming brass surfaces now crusty with age. Tile work on the vaults, cream-colored mat with glossy green edging, is the work of famed Spanish architect Rafael Guastavino. The curved motif shows itself again in a cozy mezzanine where a ticket booth once stood. The room's domelike ceiling bathes the room with light through a restored ornate glass oculus at the center. It pulls one's gaze upward, past the Roman tile wainscoting, the terra cotta arches and into the light, giving the room an ecclesiastical feel. Were it not for the grinding noise of passing trains looping back uptown, one might conceive of this intimate space as a whispering gallery.

The 102-year-old station was built when the City Beautiful movement was in full swing during the late19th-century. The movement sought to bring grace and civility to the design of municipal urban locales as a means of uplifting the public spirit.

"Back in those days," Shubert explains, "people felt they were doing a good thing creating a public space that was exalted."

On Oct. 27, 1904, New York City's Interboro Rapid Transit (IRT) subway system was officially launched from the station, with Mayor George McClellan and Financier August Belmont at the helm of the first subway car. The City Hall station, however, was quickly made obsolete when the Brooklyn Bridge station, just one block away, started to offer express service and borough connections. City Hall Station closed on New Year's Eve of 1945, having dwindled to just 800 fares per day.

Public interest in the station was rekindled in the 1970s, when it was granted interior landmark status in 1979 by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the mid 1990s, the city reopened the station briefly for public tours, but Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration, wary of terrorism, halted them.

"The new environment we live in heightened their concerns about the need for security," says Schubert. The close proximity of the station to the mayor's office even led to the installation and occasional staffing of a police booth on the platform. The unattended booth remains on the platform today.

In spite of terrorism concerns, however, the city allowed the New York Transit Museum to do some renovation work at Old City Hall Station. During the first phase of restoration in the late 1990s, the museum spent $1.5 million to fix structural problems, redo vault lights and install utility lines. Under current Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration, the museum was allowed to completely rebuild both the mezzanine's oculus and one of the stationed glass skylights in time for the Subway Centennial in 2004. The station opened to the public briefly on Oct. 27, 2004, when Mayor Bloomberg led a reenactment of the first subway ride. This fall's tours were the first public access to the station in two years.

"Now people are buying museum memberships just to go on the tour," said Adam Vargas, a museum employee. For the last tour, the Museum received about 30 new memberships for the 60-person tour. Three more members-only tours are scheduled in 2007.

With the cost of restoration a tall order and with so much above ground to preserve and to restore, museum officials admit that underground treasures face an out-of-sight, out-of-mind bias. But Schubert believes that opening the old station as a mini-museum could be a self-sustaining enterprise.

"We hope, eventually, to completely restore the station and open it to the general public. The people want to see it. It's an interesting sight that has a significant role in the history of New York," Schubert says. "I don't know when or how, but one day it is going to happen."

In the meantime, the members-only tours continue to sell out. "It's a hot ticket," Vargas says.

This story was originally published on Preservation Online on Setp. 29, 2006.