Bowery
Bowery is a station of abandonment quite deep beneath the street. It is on the Subway line built from the Williamsburg Bridge with four tracks and opened with two island platforms to platform all of them, with the outside tracks running south and through to Chambers Street, Broad Street and the Montague Street tunnels to South Brooklyn. The inside tracks terminated at Canal Street. Low ridership at the station resulted in J and Z trains bypassing the station (the only stop they skipped running 'express' in Manhattan) from 1988, when the Z train entered service with the opening of the Archer Avenue Extension until September 1, 1999, between 6:00am and 8:00pm during weekdays when M trains were operating into Manhattan, with J trains stopping at the station at other times.
A recent rerouting project of tracks that opened in 2004 closed the Jamaica-bound side of the station, rerouting those trains onto the middle track alongside the Broad Street-bound track which follows its original routing. Strangely the one open platform recently had a tactile warning strip installed. Both track walls (including the original wall between the platforms) are decked out in gray trimline with Bowery written in mosaics forming name tablets along with Bs in regular places. The bottom openings at the bottom of the wall between the platforms were not cinderblocked over like at Canal Street and glimpses through them of the closed platform show it fully lit but with reveal quite a lot of graffiti.
The station's one exit is towards the Jamaica-bound end of the station. There is first an escalator (the stops surprisingly deep) and then two staircases that meet at an intermediate landing become one up to the small fare control area just beneath the street.
There are old terra-cotta relief signs for a newsstand, the windows sealed and Women above a closed door. The portion that led to the now closed Jamaica-bound platform has walls with doors in them and even a replica trimline. There is the bank of turnstiles facing the token booth to a long narrow passageway beneath the street to a single streetstair on each side of wide Delancey Street (there is a median) between the Bowery and Chrystie Street.
The station also has an abandoned entrance and mezzanine; there are still two closed staircases up to it from the open platform, towards the Broad Street-bound end. These led up to another now closed mezzanine and former exits up to each side of Kenmare Street (the much narrower street Delancey Street becomes after crossing Bowery).
1 & 2: February 3, 2004; 3-5: January 1, 2005; 6-36: July 30, 2009; 37-47: September 24, 2023
Station Subway Lines (1988-2010)
