3. The Reason City Hall Subway Station is No Longer in Use
The City Hall Subway station is located just 600 feet south of the current Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall station where the 4/5/6 and J/M/Z trains operate. The station is 400 feet long along a curve without any straight lines of sight. The original City Hall subway station was closed in 1945 on New Year’s Eve. Original subway cars only had doors at the ends of the car, not in the center. Because the gap between the center doors and the platform at City Hall would have been too wide, center doors were kept closed when at the station. Newer IRT cars however lacked the feature which would keep only the center doors closed.
The curved shape of the station’s platform, its close proximity to other nearby stations, and the fact that it is on a loop that would be difficult to extend, were all factors in the station’s decommissioning. Today, the station is used as a turnaround for the 6 trains after they terminate at the Brooklyn Bridge stop. Though perhaps the most famous, City Hall is just one of many subway stations that have been abandoned over the system’s more than one hundred years in operation.
