The Fulton St. Transit Center hasn’t made headlines lately, and for that, the MTA must be thrilled. As the decade of cost overruns and missed deadlines, the $1.4 billion complex is on pace for a June 2014 opening. Today, DNA Info’s Julie Shapiro took a tour behind the construction fence, and the MTA runs through the regular rigamarole of construction. In a nutshell, everything is on target.
I, meanwhile, have another glimpse from above. Peter from Ink Lake blog sent in the photo atop this post, and the shape of the transit center is coming into view. Below the construction equipment, however, is something even more intriguing. One part of the Fulton St. complex is undergoing a name change.
For years, the A/C IND stop at Fulton St. hasn’t been called such. It is instead the Broadway/Nassau St. stop, and the nomenclature has been confusing for decades. As Peter noted earlier this week, this station stop will soon be called Fulton St. as well. In fact, the tiles in the walls of Brooklyn-bound side already say Fulton St. while the uptown side of the station still says Broadway/Nassau.
The odd naming patterns, says Peter, make sense historically. He writes, “All the lines except the IND, run perpendicular to Fulton Street, and thus intersect it. The A/C, runs along Fulton, and the streets it intersects with are Broadway on the western end of the station and Nassau in the easterly direction.” While one Subchatter criticizes the typography, the new name will unify the station and reduce confusion. Plus, says, Transit, because this deep platform no longer has its own street entrances, the different name served no purpose.
For a glimpse at the before-and-after photos of the station wall, click through the jump.
26 comments
Sad. I always liked the symmetry of Broadway/Nassau on the Eighth Avenue Line and Broadway/Lafayette on the Sixth Avenue Line.
As changes go, though, this one is easier to swallow than most.
It should just say FULTON. No need for the ST.
Also, I’m going to keep calling it Broadway-Nassau.
And have they taken the curves out of the walls?
No because the tunnels lead directly into the Cranberry tunnels to Brooklyn
But that wall looks horizontal, except for a small bit of a curve on top. It looks like they might have tiled over most of the curve.
I agree that ST is unnecessary (other IND stations don’t have it) – and it looks particularly odd with the white tile between the words.
The curves do not run uninterrupted through the length of the station. I think it’s the western end of the station that has boxy protrusions along the walls.
The station has the boxy look at the point, due to the Nassau Street Line (J, Z) being directly above. The cut and cover looking area is only at the part of the station, everything else is in a tube.
*only at the middle of the station
The other reason why it wasn’t originally called Fulton Street is that the IND already HAD a Fulton Street station, on the G train in Fort Greene. They did not reuse names. (That’s also why West 4th is called West 4th and not just 4th — because they planned another 4th station in Williamsburg, on South 4th, as part of the Second System.)
That’s certainly not the case – the IND has several duplicated station names, including four Manhattan cross streets and Clinton-Washington. (Is that it? That’s all I can think of.)
I think the potential confusion was with the Fulton Street line itself – the same line that this particular station is on. How could this station be called Fulton Street when a long section of the line, starting just a few stations away, runs along a different Fulton Street?
Brooklyn 7th Ave and Manhattan 7th Ave
Brooklyn 7th Ave is a BMT station. But Andrew is correct in general.
The B/Q station is BMT. The F/G station is IND.
Wikipedia: List of New York City Subway stations>Stations with the same name
The IND Crosstown Fulton Street station was built after the Broadway-Nassau Street station (1937 vs. 1933). And with the Broadway-Nassau station, those were the cross streets that identified the station, not Fulton Street in which the train lines passed under. Of course, with unification, identifying individual stations of the integrated system became as confusing as we see now. And add on top of that how the MTA counts its 468 stations: station complexes are defined by two or more stations, whereas if the subway system was built today they would be one station each.
So are they going to rename the E World Trade Center stop and the R Cortlandt St stop Fulton St also?
The Park Place stop on the 23 and the Chambers St stop on the AC will also connect to this. Maybe they should all be called Fulton St.
That’s not going to be a single station complex. There’s going to be an underground passageway from the Fulton complex to the two stations under Church, but there won’t be free transfers between them.
There isn’t going to be a free transfer from Fulton to PATH’s WTC station, is there?
A free transfer from NYC Transit to PATH? No.
Oh well.
Apparently anything that makes PATH more useful to New Yorkers is too much of an accounting challenge for the MTA and PA.
The primary beneficiaries would be New Jerseyers, not New Yorkers.
It’s not an accounting challenge at all (until a few years ago, there were free transfers between the subway and a bunch of private bus lines in Queens). It’s a question of how the lost fare revenue would be recovered, and whether it really makes sense to reduce fares in this particular manner.
Renaming it is absolutely the right thing to do.
I do agree that the extra “ST” is entirely unnecessary.
About the general issue of station names:
On the balance, it makes more sense for a station to be named after an intersection than after two parallel streets.
For a while some years ago, the name of the station at 53rd and Lex was changed from “Lexington Ave.” to “Lexington-Third Avenues”.
Now it’s called Lexington Ave./53 St., which tells you instantly where you are.
It’s unfortunate that Broadway-Lafayette was not Broadway/Houston St. instead.
I want to add that sometimes a “landmark” is just as good, or maybe better, than the intersecting street.
For instance:
42nd St – Grand Central
42nd St – Bryant Park
42nd St – Times Square
42nd St – Port Authority
Broadway-Nassau and Broadway-Lafayette are just like naming any of the above stations as “42nd St.-40 St.”
In Los Angeles, it’s standard to name stations after intersections. So the Purple Line, which runs under Wilshire, has stations named Wilshire/Vermont, Wilshire/Normandie, and Wilshire/Western.
That would make too much sense here. When the LIRR terminal in Brooklyn was still called “Flatbush Avenue”, one would think they need to take the 2 train to the end of the line (Flatbush Avenue stop), not to the station called “Atlantic Avenue”.