Over at Second Avenue Sagas, a discussion of the long-gone Culver Shuttle, and its now-abandoned Ninth Avenue lower-level platform, segued into talk about the Chambers Street BMT station.
While a favorite of mine and certainly not abandoned, the station, constructed in 1913, has definitely seen better days.
Designed at a time, when it saw much more service than today, it is relatively lightly used today, the adjoining Brooklyn Bridge IRT station getting much more traffic.
A key scene in the Ethan Hawke/Gwyneth Paltrow version of Dickens’ Great Expectations was shot there, and I remember during the Bernhard Goetz criminal trial, the jury visited a train parked there (a jury, coincidentally, that my cousin sat on).
Located directly below, and constructed contemporaneously with the Municipal Building, its high ceilings, filthy white tiles, closed stairwells and stalactites, give the station a Miss Havisham or even Moria-ish air, but just like that underground kingdom, there are still bits of treasure lurking about.
The tiles for the station, portraying a fanciful (no diagonal cables) Brooklyn Bridge are really beautiful, and though covered in grime, are largely intact.
The Transit Museum Store sells replicas, and I have one in my kitchen.
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