Underneath the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, just a few steps from the busy Metro-North tracks at Grand Central Terminal, lies Track 61, a relic of another era. This track, now abandoned, had long been a mystery. Commuters can catch only glimpses of it, and it’s off-limits to all but the most senior MTA officials.

In 2007, Trainjotting offered up a few tidbits about Track 61, and yesterday, Matt Lauer on the Today Show went underground with a Metro-North spokesman to publicize of the track. The story is fascinating; it was built to accommodate FDR during his presidency when he tried to keep the extent of his disability brought about my polio under wraps. Watch the story, complete with a great look underground and word that maybe the platform isn’t as abandoned as we speak, right here.

Update: Loyal reader Francis Morrone points us to the Abandoned Stations entry on Track 61. It clears up the history and misconceptions surrounding the track’s origins. The track itself pre-dates FDR’s presidency.

Thousands of people walk past this subway entrance at 52nd and 8th, unaware of its history. (Photo by RJ Mickelson for amNew York)

We started the week with a tale about a doomed abandoned platform at 42nd and 8th Ave. Let’s end the week ten blocks north standing outside a gated subway entrance at 52nd St. and 8th Ave.

In what very well might be the best story to appear in the pages of amNew York — sorry, Chris — Matthew Sweeney explores the history of a subway entrance that has sat closed since 1991, and no one really knows what it was doing there in the first place. The article is part of a two-parter in Friday’s amNew York about some of the partnerships the MTA has formed with the buildings that climb high above their stations. The other piece focuses on the MTA’s tortured relationships with its escalators.

Sweeney gives us the history:

Paid for with private funds in 1986 — when the misbegotten K train still ran — the subway entrance at Eighth Avenue and 52nd Street has been gated and locked for nearly two decades.

It’s been shut for so long New York City Transit on Thursday could not remember when or why it ordered the gates locked. Transit officials also couldn’t say whether it will ever be open again. “It’s kind of ridiculous,” said real estate developer Adam Rose, who built the stairwell entrance to what is now the uptown C and E train platform. “The day after it opened, they closed it.”

Rose’s memory is not entirely accurate. For a brief period the entrance was open at off hours. But even then, it was not always open when it was supposed to be, said Andrew Albert, chairman of the NYC Transit Riders Council. According to Albert, the entrance was permanently closed after a woman was stabbed in the stairway in 1991.

The article doesn’t explain why the MTA has decided to close the entrance and why it was never fully staffed in the first place leading up to the Linda Belle stabbing. The building, according to Rose, was forced to construct the entrance by the MTA. Now, it sits empty, a late-1980s subway map hanging on the wall and trash collecting at the bottom of the stairwell.

Say what you will about MTA management in this instance, but stories like these are why I love the subways. While we see a lot of the system on the surface just by passing through, so many of the quirky stories behind its nooks and crannies are lost to time. You’ve got art in abandoned stations and artistic stations long since abandoned. We think of the subway map as static, but train lines head up different avenues and switch stops seemingly on a whim over the years.

The next time I walk past 52nd St. and 8th Ave., I’ll stop for a minute or two to take in an entrance I’ve seen and ignored countless times over the course of my life. One day, it may have a purpose; today, it’s just another one of New York’s great subway what if’s.

Three hundred feet south of the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall stop on the East Side IRT lies an abandoned subway station. Called “the world’s most beautiful former subway station” by Forgotten NY, this station is the City Hall stop that served as in the inaugural launching point for the city’s subway system in 1904.

The station is ornate with chandeliers and Guastavino arches embellished with green tiling and decorative skylights. The station is also impractical. It’s a one-way local-only stop 300 feet away from a big transfer point that features both local and express IRT service. It’s built around a very sharp curve that makes the gaps at Union Square seem small. The City recognized these shortcomings and shut the station on December 31, 1945.

For fifty years, there it lay empty and unused. Trains on the 6 line would crawl through the darkened loop as they turned from downtown trains into uptown trains, but passengers were urged to dismount at Brooklyn Bridge. In the late 1990s, as the subway’s centennial neared, the MTA wanted to open the old station as an outpost of the Transit Museum. The museum started giving tours, but in 1998, the Giuiliani Administration declared the station a security risk due to its proximity to City Hall.

As the centennial came in 2004, the Transit Museum received permission to reopen the station to tours, and a few months ago, the MTA started allowing customers to ride past it on the 6 train. Every few months, Transit Museum members can take the tour of the Crown Jewel of the subway system. It’s an incredible glimpse back in time, and as the station is unique among all of the rest of the city’s 100-year stations, it’s really something to see up close.

This weekend, I finally took the tour and brought my camera along with me. While the conditions are tough for photography — it’s very poorly lit inside the station — I tried to get as many pictures as I could. You can view the entire set on flickr. But let’s take a closer look at a few shots.

• After the train lets out, everyone heads up to the second level for a brief introduction to the station. The crowd gathers underneath one of the iron skylights. (Head-on view here). This skylight is embedded in the ground in City Hall Park.
• The second level features a restored staircase that formerly led up to a cupola entrance. That entrance is now sealed in and leads to City Hall Park. Customers would come through that entrance and see this gateway to the platform.
• The station is known for its arches and skylights. The skylights were painted black during World War II to hide the light from potential air raids. Some of the skylights no longer have any glass. The chandeliers are original too, and some are in better shape than others.
• Plaques commemorating the founding and building of the subway line the wall opposite the platform. This one honors the engineers; this one the construction company and August Belmont; and this one the opening of the subway.
• Check out the wide gap and the extreme curvature of the station.
• Your intrepid blogger poses next to a City Hall sign and underneath the entryway to the platform.

A 1939 map of the BMT shows the now-forgotten Myrtle Ave. stop on the edge of the Manhattan Bridge. (Courtesy of NYC Subway Historical Maps)

Before the spate of Second Ave. subway news hit, we were talking about the Masstransiscope in the remains of the old, abandoned Myrtle Ave. stop on the BMT line that runs over the Manhattan Bridge. Abandoned stations hide the mysteries and romance of a lost age in New York City history, and the Myrtle Ave. stop is no different.

For those living in Brooklyn, sick of seeing the N and D glide past the middle tracks at De Kalb Ave. when the R, Q or B just won’t show up, the Myrtle Ave. stop contains the promise, however slim, of an added stop in Brooklyn. For others, this abandoned stop is a playground within the subway. Can we go off on an expotition and romp around the empty platforms?

Nowadays, we can, as NY1 finally reported two weeks after I did, view the old City Hall stop from the 6 as it turns on that steep curve, but the Myrtle Ave. stop is one lost to time.

For starters, the southbound platform at Myrtle Ave. was completely demolished after the station went out of service in 1956. But why the changes? Joseph Brennan, an expert on abandoned stations, explains:

The De Kalb Ave section was the choke point for the entire BMT Broadway subway operation, with a lot of merges and some routings crossing others at grade in the swiches on both sides of the station. The maximum train capacity of the system was set here. After decades of problems, the Transit Authority began a rebuild of the area in 1956, adding some new trackage to eliminate all the grade crossings and provide places to hold trains approaching merge points.

Myrtle Ave station was a casualty of the rebuild. A new track had to be added on the west side to allow for a grade-separated crossing. The original southbound “local” track at the platform had to be depressed to a lower grade to cross under, and the new track wiped out the southbound platform. The northbound platform was left in place but no longer operated.

Still something of a choke point on the system — how many folks sit on a B train while a D crosses in front and how many wish the trains wouldn’t crawl coming down off the bridge — imagine how much worse it could be. To streamline the N and D trains as they bypass De Kalb on the express tracks and head either onto the Manhattan Bridge or into Pacific Street, the Myrtle Ave. southbound platform had to go.

Still, the northbound platform sits abandoned and covered in graffiti. It can no longer be used because the platform is shorter than the long BMT trains now in use. Furthermore, as frequent commenter Peter noted on Monday, the City is allowing a developer who recently purchased the block above the old Myrtle Ave. platform to demolish the access points to the old station. The only way to reach Myrtle Ave., a relic of the early 20th Century subway system, will be through the incredibly dangerous tunnels north of De Kalb Ave.

So the dreams of an abandoned station will go die. Like the ghost stop in front of my parents’ apartment building on West 91st St., the Myrtle Ave. station has lain dormant for 50 years. Soon, all we’ll see are glimpses of a platform through an abandoned zoetrope, and riders will forever wonder just what it was they fleetingly saw out the window.

Riders of the 6 train can now comfortably view the City Hall stop. (Courtesy of flickr user psedie.)

For official purposes, the last stop on the downtown 6 train is the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall stop. It’s a four-track station and the last chance to switch to the downtown IRT trains into Brooklyn.

But at this stop, the 6 doesn’t just start back uptown. Instead, it turns around in a loop station that has lain dormant for over 60 years. This station, considered the most beautiful in the New York City subway, is the City Hall station. With its Gustavino arches and intricate chandeliers, it was the original starting point for the first line of the IRT in 1904.

The station went out of service because the gap between the train and platform grew too wide and because it is a mere 300 feet from the Brooklyn Bridge stop. While plans to reopen it as part of the Transit Museum were halted due to security concerns following the Sept. 11 attacks, for years, those in the know knew that a savvy rider could spy this station if they stayed on the 6 train as it made its curve along that tight loop.

While the automated announcements have long said that the Brooklyn Bridge is the last stop, riders could generally stay on the train provided they ask the transit workers or simply avoided them. It’s thrilling to see the dimly lit station come into view as the 6 crawls around the sharp curve.

Now, via Chuck Bennett’s excellent Tracker Blog comes the news that the MTA will no longer be calling the Brooklyn Bridge stop the “last stop”. Bennett writes:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the next stop on this train will be the Brooklyn Bridge – City Hall uptown platform. For your safety, please remain inside of the car until the train comes to a complete stop and the doors open.”

No more “last stop.”

So now, we’re not sneaking around the trains to spy the beautiful City Hall stop. Enjoy the view.