York Street
The York Street station is located in Dumbo, right underneath the Manhattan Bridge near the waterfront. This means the station has a very unusual design because it is located a bit deep underground with its one island platform in Rutgers Street tunnel. Let's begin at the stations single entrance. It is a staircase located directly in the ventilation structure that serves the Rutgers Street tunnel. The ventilation structure is located at the SE corner of York Street and Jay Street on the edge of Susan Smith McKinney Stewart Park. This staircase leads to a small fare control area underground with the token booth and a few turnstiles. This leads to a long passageway that slopes down a bit, is quite a long and continued to ramp down, getting much deeper before reaching a single staircase down to the extreme western (railway-north) end of the station's island platform, at the Manhattan-bound end of the platform, just before trains enter the Rutgers Street Tubes.
This entrance is one of the longest passageways I can think of on the subway to reach an exit of any sort. As Dumbo has continued to gentrify with office workers and residents replacing the former industrial and warehouse workers that used to use the station, ridership has increased. This single entrance is creating dangerous conditions during rush hour and other times when there are special events that create a large draw of people to the neighborhood. Once I got off a York Street to go to a temporary art exhibit on the supports of the Manhattan Bridge and the crowds at York Street were dangerous (we ended up walking to High Street to leave the area) with long lines of people lining up outside to go down the narrow staircase into the station (there were plenty of police officers trying, including a temporary fence going down the middle of the passageway so people to keep entering and exiting passengers, like us, getting off the subway separated so could leave the station safely). Unlike many IND stations there are no closed entrances to reopen because of the stops unique location just before an underwater tube, although local politicians have called on the MTA to study and add a second entrance to help with these dangerous conditions.
Once reaching the platform, the track walls are sloped a bit because of the tunnel location and have York in white tiled on black that is directly set in an unusual purple trim line that is at the top of the portion of the tunnel walls that are tiled and not painted black. The white tiles along the platform walls are rectangles that look like their holding up a building, not the standard white squares. Along each track on the platform are slightly wider than usual columns painted a medium hue of blue. In addition, there are a couple of tiled over, large circular structures set right in the middle of the platform. These circular structures cluttering the platform are helping to provide drainage for the peers of the Manhattan Bridge that the station goes directly under.
Photo 1-19: June 9, 2009
