59 Street
The Upper Level of the Lexington Avenue Line at 59 Street was originally the only IRT station, express trains skipped it running in their much lower level tunnel. The stop has the standard two island platforms for the two track line. Its walls have the standard dual-contracts area 59 Street name tablets with little 59s in the trimline.
Directly along this platform are the stations 4 principal exits except for those to 3 Avenue directly from the BMT platform. Both platforms have at their southern ends unstaffed exits to 59 Street & Lexington Avenue, with both regular and high turnstiles. Exits from each lead to no standard street stairs. From the uptown platform the only exit is to the SE corner and a wide staircase inside a modern office building in the middle of the store windows of an H & M inside the Bloomburg Tower. There are two from the downtown platform, at the SW corner, slightly down 59 Street and a narrower almost unmarked entrance along the storefronts of a Banana Republic. The NW corner is an unusually designed street stair with a glass railing area and marble beneath it, slightly offset from the sidewalk due to the little plaza in front of the office building called 'International Plaza'.
This is followed by a staircase down to the small underpass that crosses beneath to the uptown local platform, there are locked doors to non-public areas inside of it, this is due to this area when the station was under construction being designed for the uptown platform for the BMT Subway to Queens, originally it was to run in two separate one track tunnels beneath 59 Street and 60 Streets, instead one tunnel beneath 60 Street was built. Next along each platform is a single up escalator/staircase combination down to the respective express platform. This is followed by a newsstand along each of the platforms, and the upper landings of the up-only escalators from the lower-levels mezzanine area (there is no way to reach this mezzanine going down except via the Broadway Line's platforms).
The northern end of the platforms is where the exits to and from 60 Street are as well as the connections to the Broadway Line's Lexington Avenue station that crosses beneath the station here. On the uptown platform this exit consists of a single narrow fare control area (There are a couple High Exit Turnstiles to provide more direct access from the exits up from the N,Q,R platforms) with a conventional street stair out to the NE corner and an entrance offset from the sidewalk directly inside Bloomingdale's (along 60 Street) near the SE corner. This street stair has a mosaic above the entrance that says subway (surrounded by two conventional subway globes) and two mosaic name tablets above the staircase down, the first for 59 Street, the second for Lexington Avenue, the stops two cross-street names. There is also an entrance before fare control directly into the basement level of Bloomingdale's.
On the downtown platform this area is more confusing. Just before the up-only escalators from the lower-level mezzanine are two High turnstiles and a MVM that lead out to a street stair of the unusual glass design to the SW corner of 59 Street/Lexington Avenue, then is the main staircase and up escalator from the middle-level BMT N,Q,R platform and opposite this are two banks of turnstiles at a 45 degree angle to each other, the full time token booth and a single conventional street stair to the NW corner.
The Uptown platform has two abandoned entrances both from department stores. At the southern end was an entrance to the basement of a long closed department store. In the middle of the platform between 59 and 60 Streets were once store windows directly into the basement of Bloomingdale's with an additional exit.
Photos 1-3: July 28, 2009; 4-32: May 21, 2010; 33-39: October 31, 2012; 40-45: November 1, 2012; 46-53:
