An Ave. A entrance to the L's 1st Ave. stop would be a boon for Alphabet City.
As subway expansion plans and a city-subsidized ferry service have made headlines lately, the L train has come under consideration from some of my readers. I recently did some sleuthing on the potential for expansion within Manhattan and can now answer the question of why. Why doesn’t the L stop at Ave. C? Why is there no Ave. A entrance?
The 14th St. route into Williamsburg and beyond has seen tremendous growth over the last 15 years, but its limitations, especially in Manhattan, are obvious. It stops every two avenues until First Ave. and then not again until Bedford Ave., leaving the eastern part of the island without easy subway access. From a planning perspective, an entrance at Ave. A would alleviate pressure at First Ave. and bring the subway one very long avenue block closer to Alphabet City. At stop at Ave. C would be even better.
I had a chance to query Transit on these concerns this week and wanted to share the results. At Ave. C, as many expected, the engineering demands and issues with the city’s water table make a stop there too difficult to maintain. In an email, a Transit spokesman said he consulted with the operations planning team, and they explained the issues. “After the L train leaves 1st Ave., it begins to descend and the slope is too great to place a station (and reliably stop trains),” he said. “Excavating the station and smoothing out the tunnel would be extraordinarily challenging because the ground at that particular location is all filled in swamp. We would likely have to close the L completely for years during construction.”
The entrance at Ave. A however has suffered from another fate entirely. Transit tells me this is both a feasible and beneficial idea. In fact, it has been “conceptually sketched out” but it has “never made the capital program.” I don’t have any further explanation as to why it has been omitted from expansion plans, but I can guess that it’s not been a long-term priority. Up until quite recently, population growth in that area and L train ridership would not have warranted an entrance at Ave. A.
As they say, knowing is half the battle, and now we know. Of course, armed with this knowledge, community groups in the East Village, Alphabet City and Stuyvesant Town should began agitating for a concrete commitment to build out the entrance at Ave. A. It’s a project worth pitching for the five-year capital plan that starts in 2015, and it’s one that could be realized by the end of the decade.
19 comments
They’d probably have to make it feasible for passengers to get on the L at First Avenue first.
The Avenue ‘A’ entrance has been in the “planning stages” for at least 40 years, and certainly in the years right after the construction of the Wald House, Haven Plaza and the other high-rises to the south of 14th Street. The problem may be since it wouldn’t be considered the “main” entrance to the station with 24/7/365 staffing (and wouldn’t be similar to some new station entrances tied into the construction of new office buildings above the station), it’s never been placed on the front burner for the MTA’s Capital Program.
There’s no way this could be just an ordinary non-staffed entrance with HEET turnstiles. With all of the foot traffic in that area to do so would be a terrible mistake. The Avenue A entrance also could not be as narrow as the 1st Avenue end if it could be helped. That end is a nightmare, but Avenue A has the potential to be just as bad.
The problem with installing HEETs in narrow entrances can be seen at Fulton Street station on the 4 & 5 at the uptown side Maiden Lane entrance. It’s a nightmare. During the evening rush passengers flood the stairs and are immediately met with a emergency exit/Auto Gate for the disabled to the left, an exit only high turnstile in the middle and three HEETs to the right away from the direction of the platform. Two MVM sit against the wall directly in front of the HEETs blocking use of the third HEET regularly so everyone attempts to use the first two. Most people swipe at the HEET without regard for checking to see if the transaction was accepted first and that cost time. Then you have the people who block the line swiping insufficient fare cards. Follow that up with the tourist who swipe, pull the gate from the left and then attempt to walk through. Finally you have the card reader that’s dirty forcing many missed swipes. The line that builds backs up the stairs almost to the top.
Well looks like lesson learned. A new smaller emergency gate was installed between the exit only and the HEETS. The original gate has been removed and conventional turnstiles have been installed in their place and are awaiting the wiring work. My only question is if a gate will be installed in front of those turnstiles for use during non-peak periods of time.
Moot point. NYCT is now willing to have unstaffed low turnstiles.
This is of course NOT the main issue here, but that map sure is confusing to look at.
Where it says “1 Avenue”, that’s just the name of the ststion, but that makes it look like that street is First Ave.
It turns out that that street is 14th St. and the OTHER wide street is First Ave.
That’s just a detail of the larger neighborhood map. I’m sure it probably makes more sense when you look at the whole thing.
At the 3rd Ave stop, they could easily install an entrance at 2nd Ave, which would help with the connection to the bus. Instead, I think they are planning to wait until the 2nd Ave subway is built.
Living on Avenue D in Manhattan myself, I have to depend on the M14D bus to get to the nearest subway, as the near subway stations to me are Essex & Delancey(FMJZ), 2nd Avenue(F), and 1st Avenue (L). I would REALLY like it if there was some kind of subway coming through here, even if they took the stub-end at 2nd ave and sent it to avenue B as a final stop (If the V was ever brought back.).
I really don’t get why the MTA hasn’t included this in their plans. After all, how expensive can tunneling a stairway to Avenue A be?
Would just a stairway be acceptable? I’d think there would be pressure to make the station accessible while they were at it.
Indeed. I personally consider accessibility the elephant in the room when it comes to the NYC subway as well as all older metro systems.
It’s next to impossible to get on a train at First Avenue going West, especially during the morning rush. Because of the gentrification of Williamsburg and other formerly low income neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the L train is always packed (mostly with young people who wear backpacks the size of air conditioners and are oblivious to anyone around them). They just didn’t take this congestion into consideration when they forced out the poorer people and tarted up the formerly scruffy neighborhoods in Brooklyn and marketed them to all these kids from the flyover states who think they’re so hip. Typical Bloombergian thinking.
There’s a complementary bus route making the same trip from 14th and 1st. There’s no shortage of capacity on this route.
A lot are trying to get to Union Square or the Lexington Avenue lines. Although, if you’re going to somewhere in the east 20s or 30s, leaving at First or Third Aves. really offers a hidden, unpublicized gem. I stopped transferring at Union a while ago.
If you look at ridership data over the years, most of the what is currently the L train doesn’t have the ridership today that it did during its historic peak. Most stations, including 1st Ave, had a huge spike in boardings not too long after the beginning of service, and saw a long decline in ridership which only recently has begun to turn around. The L isn’t as “congested” as it once was, and it’s not over capacity.
You want to see stops where the ridership record is broken every year? Go to neighborhoods in Central Queens. Growth in ridership there has been the result of immigration, not gentrification.
Yes, how stupid of Bloomberg to allow subway riders to move to neighborhoods served by the subway!
I’m not sure I want to lay all the blame at Bloomberg’s feet by a long shot, but he hasn’t exactly been the greatest advocate for more expansive subway accesss. I get that it’s a tool to move middle class people into hip neighborhoods, and he seems to grasp that as well as any politician, but it’s also a tool to bring people in poorer neighborhoods to jobs – or to offer jobs to people who will at least leave behind a useful capital service. Much as middle class people improve the tax base, people who are already here shouldn’t be ignored.
Thank you for addressing this issue (I was one of your readers that requested this)
The idea for this is driven not by capacity of the L Train but the acknowledgment that the East Village has a lack of access to the Subway
If you live on Avenue D you have to walk 4 Avenues to get to a subway stop. At least with an Avenue A stop it gets alittle better.
I think an unmanned entrance would be perfectly fine – What WOULD be great is if they could create a tunnel to get from 8th Avenue track to the Carnasie Track which you currently can’t do until Union Square.
As far as why not? I think it is a type of low handing fruit hasn’t happen is really that some smart politicians hasn’t made this his project.
Would be really good to see the L train extended to 10 cars, from its current 8 car lengths, although I’d imagine extending the platforms all along the line would take quite a bit of time. Looking back at the history of the subway, it seemed like platform extensions were happening all of the time at multiple stations, yet there haven’t been any recently, and I bet it would be exorbitantly expensive to extend every station’s platform along that line. Nonetheless, gentrification continues to extend way down along the line – I went to an experimental music show just a few weeks ago all the way down at the Halsey street stop. If growth in ridership continues to happen that way, then maybe the viability of such a platform extension project would exist.