Not The Usual

The 181st Street station on the 1 train, at St. Nicholas Avenue.¹

The station opened in 1906, as one of the very early extensions on the original IRT subway. More importantly, for my train of thought, it was built by tunneling because of the hilly geography of northern Manhattan. Nearly all of the early IRT was built cut-and-cover, but the part of the line north of 168th Street until it goes above ground at Dyckman Street was mostly tunneled. So the usual IRT roof (a series of steel beams supported by a forest of columns and supporting concrete vaults) wouldn’t really make sense here because building it, while possible, doesn’t flow naturally from the tunneling process.

As you can see in the photo, there are two kinds of station roof here. The first, at the center of the platform, is a high space with a single semicircular-vault roof. The second is lower, with a vault over the tracks and flat ceilings over the platforms. The usual cut-and-cover ceilings are steel-framed with concrete infill, but the vaults here are concrete, with visible form marks:

The big center vault has brick veneer, but it’s concrete behind, just like the tile walls are veneer. Meanwhile, there’s definitely steel framing at this station, visible at the bridge over the tracks:

My guess is the platform ceilings at the low areas are concrete vaults supported on concrete-encased steel beams and columns – 1906 was very early in the history of concrete use in New York – but they might be all concrete.

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1. Fun fact! St. Nick is the patron saint of NYC, presumably because people here are so friendly and giving. ↩︎