A look inside the abandoned Worth Street subway station in Lower Manhattan, shuttered in the 1960s
Like so many streets spanning Lower Manhattan, Worth Street packs a lot of history.
Originally after a descendent of the colonial-era Lispenard family, which owned a vast tract of land in today’s Tribeca, it was one of the five streets that formed the entrance to Five Points—the East Side slum located north of City Hall and east of the Bowery.
Worth Street was then renamed in 1854 to honor General William Jenkins Worth, a hero of the Mexican-American war. Cleaned up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became home to municipal buildings on the eastern end and warehouses on the west.
Having such a long backstory makes a street significant. But one thing Worth Street no longer has is its namesake subway station, which once had entrances and exits at the corners of Worth and Lafayette Streets.
One of the original 28 IRT stations with the old-school kiosk (above photo) opened in 1904, the Worth Street station—sandwiched between Canal Street and the Brooklyn Bridge stops (below, on a 1918 transit map)—was shuttered permanently in 1962.
Why did it get the boot? It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Worth Street was the site of the subway system’s first collision, in 1905, which resulted in several injuries and was blamed on “human fallibility” on the part of the motorman.
Instead, it had to do with platform extensions at the neighboring Brooklyn Bridge Station mandated by the NYC Transit Authority in 1956 to relieve crowding.
The platforms at the Worth Street Station were extended twice already, once in 1910 and again in 1948, to accommodate longer trains. The extension at Brooklyn Bridge would make it so 10-car trains could fit the platform, according to the Abandoned Stations website by Joseph Brennan.
But extending the Brooklyn Bridge platform would bring it too close to the Worth Street station. Worth Street was made redundant, and thus it was set to close, per the New York Times in 1957.
In September 1962, Worth Street was put out to pasture, and for some time the Brooklyn Bridge station was called “Brooklyn Bridge-Worth Street,” per Brennan.
It’s certainly not a secret that some of the first subway stations were eventually closed as transit needs changed. Think the beautiful City Hall station, the 18th Street stop above Union Square, and the 91st Street station at Broadway.
Still, the idea of an abandoned station, complete with the signs, token booths, and infrastructure of its era, holds a lot of fascination. It feels like an underground time capsule, a portal to the city’s past ready to be opened and explored.
The Worth Street station supposedly sits under the public plaza at the Federal Plaza building at the corner of Worth and Lafayette Streets on Foley Square. Federal Plaza began construction in 1963, just after the Worth Street stop was decommissioned—making it seem that the generous size of the plaza area serves as the station’s tomb.
I didn’t see secret way in, and I’m not sure I’m intrepid enough to check out an abandoned subway station without some backup. But two decades ago, the adventurers behind a site called the LTV Squad descended beneath the street and posted ghostly photos of the decayed platform and graffitied walls on their website.
[Top photo: 3am.nightly via Wikipedia; second photo: New York Transit Museum; third image: transitmap.net; fourth photo: New York Transit Museum; fifth image: New York Transit Museum; sixth image: Wikipedia; seventh image: New York Transit Museum]
