A Ghost Of A Ghost

I’m mildly surprised that I’ve only written about two of the ghost subway stations – Worth Street and the famous City Hall Station. (I’ve written about discontinued lines, but that’s not quite the same thing as a now-unused station that trains pass every hour of every day.) Today’s topic is not a ghost station since it was never built – it was an idea that was rejected, twice, and is now probably moot.

Most mass transit system have a few heavily travelled trunk lines in the center of the city they serve, with each trunk splitting into multiple branches further out, as the area to be covered gets larger and less-densely developed. The IRT subway has (excluding the Flushing line/7 train, which was a later purchase rather than part of the original plan) two trunks (east side and west side) leading to three branches at the south end of Manhattan and in Brooklyn and five branches at the north end of Manhattan and in the Bronx. There was originally only one trunk (east side south of 42nd Street and west side north of 42nd) and as a result there was (and is) a major branch on the Upper West Side to get trains from there to the eastern Bronx branches. North of the 96th Street express station, the express trains turn east under 104th Street, then run diagonally under Central Park to 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, and then north under Lenox.

When the subway still in construction, in 1903, people living near Central Park petitioned the city government and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company to build a station on the Lenox branch at 104th Street and Central Park West. The city’s Rapid Transit Board, on the recommendation of chief engineer William Barclay Parsons, decided the station was too expensive and would cause too much delay relative to the benefit it represented. (See the New York Times, March 20, 1903, “Rapid Transit Station Abandoned.”) There was another attempt after the subway opened (NYT, February, 1909, “For New Subway Station”) but it seems to have gone nowhere. The construction of the Eighth Avenue subway, opening in 1932, provided service to this area including a station at 103rd Street, but the idea never quite goes away: there was a Reddit thread on this topic in 2023.

It’s hard to feel nostalgic for something that never was, but it’s amusing to contemplate yet another stub dead end (this one figurative rather than literal) in the subway story. Finally, what picture should I use to illustrate something never built and never designed? Here’s a postcard (!) showing the flyover, where express tracks at 98th Street drop below the local track elevation to allow for the curve to 104th Street without direct intersection: