Chambers Street (BMT Nassau Street Line)
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| New York City Subway station Chambers Street |
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|---|---|
| Station Information | |
| Line | BMT Nassau Street Line |
| Services | J M (12) Z (1a) |
| Transfer | 4 5 (1234) 6 <6> (12) at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall  (IRT Lexington Avenue Line) |
| Platforms | 3 island platforms, 2 side platforms (1 walled up) |
| Tracks | 4 |
| Other | |
| Borough | Manhattan |
| Opened | March 14, 1913 |
| Next North | Canal Street J M (12) Z (1a) |
| Next South | Fulton Street J (1235a) M (1) Z (1a) |
Chambers Street is a station on the BMT Nassau Street Line of the New York City Subway. Located at the intersection of Centre and Chambers Streets beneath the Manhattan Municipal Building, it is served by the J train (all times), the M train (all times except weekends and late nights), and the Z train (rush hours).
There are four tracks, three island platforms, and one side platform (originally two). In 1931, the center island platform and both side platforms were closed as unnecessary. The west side platform was walled up and partly demolished when the Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall station on the IRT Lexington Avenue Line was rebuilt on the other side of the wall in 1960–62.
The J, M, and Z trains all use the outermost tracks during rush hours. The M train uses the two middle tracks to terminate and lay up trains during the middays. The J also uses these tracks during weekends, when service is not extended to Broad Street.
[edit] History
This was one of the earliest BMT subway stations opened in New York City, built at a time when Lower Manhattan was the city's principal business district. It was designed to be the BMT's Manhattan hub, with trains arriving from Brooklyn in both directions, and terminating here. Originally, trains arrived from the north via either the Williamsburg Bridge or the Manhattan Bridge.
The Nassau Street subway loop was completed in 1931, making Chambers Street a through station south to the Montague Street Tunnel to Brooklyn. The loop configuration permitted trains arriving in either direction from the BMT Fourth Avenue Line in Brooklyn to pass through Chambers Street and return to Fourth Avenue without turning around. A track connection to the Brooklyn Bridge, which would have made a similar loop through the Williamsburg Bridge, was planned in the station's design, but never built. (See BMT Brooklyn Loops.)
By the 1950s, Chambers Street was no longer as important a station, as many of the city's business interests had shifted to midtown. The Chrystie Street Connection, completed in 1967, severed the Nassau line's connection to the Manhattan Bridge, so that the bridge tracks could connect instead to the uptown IND Sixth Avenue Line. The tracks heading towards the Manhattan Bridge (now used for train storage) are clearly visible from northbound trains leaving Chambers Street.
Although altered over the years to account for changing ridership patterns, the station has not been renovated. In one poll, it was voted the ugliest station in the system:
| When it was being built before World War I, Chambers Street was envisioned as a City Hall terminal, a kind of downtown Grand Central at a time when the business and population center of the city was still closer to the southern end of the island. Three years after it opened, its four wide platforms were so overcrowded that one newspaper article described them as more dangerous during the rush hours than at the Grand Central or the Fourteenth Street Stations.
But by the mid-1920's, the subway itself was pushing the city's population north and leaving Chambers Street behind. By as early as the 1930's, in fact, the station's ridership had dropped off so steeply that half of it was closed. Walking around the station now, it seems as if half of the station has not been cleaned or repaired since the 1930's, either. Platforms are piled deep with the detritus of the years — an old push broom, a broken umbrella, a toaster and several foothills of soda bottles, all of which could be precisely dated according to the depth of the dark-brown steel dust coating them. In one part of the platform, an original Heins and LaFarge terra cotta plaque of the Brooklyn Bridge seems to have been crowbarred off the wall. In another, the yellowish-white water damage is so extensive it appears that a crew of C.H.U.D.'s tried to eat its way to daylight. |
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—Randy Kennedy, "They're Subway Experts. Take Their Word on What's Ugly," The New York Times, May 13, 2003 |
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