7. Brooklyn Manor is an abandoned LIRR Station in Kew Gardens

Brooklyn Manor LIRR station in Kew Gardens, Queens
The abandoned Brooklyn Manor LIRR station.

Sitting in broad daylight at the intersection of Hillside Avenue and Myrtle Avenue is the abandoned Brooklyn Manor elevated LIRR station. Built in 1911 as part of the Rockaway Beach branch, the station served a small development of 603 houses called Brooklyn Manor. When the Rockaway Beach branch was electrified, the Brooklyn Manor station was upgraded to serve electric trains with two new platforms. Only a few years after its opening, the Jamaica Avenue Elevated, now the J/Z trains, opened the 121st Street station in the area.

The combination of rapid transit service and the LIRR station gave this section of Kew Gardens exceptional connection to Manhattan up until the early 1960s. Then began the period of decline. In 1958, the two platforms on the Brooklyn Manor LIRR station were consolidated into an island platform to combat increased vandalism. Then, in 1962, the northern half of the Rockaway Beach branch was abandoned altogether and the southern section was subsumed by the subway as the A train. Today, the Brooklyn Manor station is overgrown with grasses and small trees, giving it the appearance of the High Line before its conversion into a linear park. Although there have been recent proposals to reactivate the abandoned section of track as either a bike trail or a rail corridor, those ideas have so far remained only on paper.