Transit hub’s rich history

The 72nd Street express subway station, at the intersection of 72nd Street, Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is one of the busiest stations on the West Side, serving the 1, 2 and 3 trains.

But it also has a feature that very few other stations have. It has its very own above-ground station house, known in subway lingo as a control house. At one time, about five or six subway stations had control houses, but now only three do –72nd Street, Bowling Green, and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn (although the Atlantic Avenue structure, on a much smaller traffic island in middle of the intersection of three busy streets, is no longer used for its original purpose).

Moreover, 72nd Street has not one, but two control houses – the original on the south side of the street, and the second on the north side.

How did this happen. It’s an interesting story.

The station opened as part of the city’s first subway line, built and operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, in 1904. As Forgotten New York pointed out, the nearby Ansonia Hotel was completed the same year, and over the years the guests included such luminaries as Arturo Toscanini, Theodore Dreiser and Igor Stravinski.

In designing this control house and others, the architectural firm of Heins &LaFarge was inspired by similar structures connected to Boston’s Tremont Street subway, which was built a few years before, according to Wikipedia. Because of its architectural significance, the structure was eventually named to the National Register of Historic Places.

However, the station was inadequate as soon as it opened. The staircases and platforms were both extremely narrow, making things uncomfortable for passengers entering or exiting the system here. During the 1950s, the Transit Authority considered converting 72nd Street to a local station and making 59th Street-Columbus Circle an express stop. This never happened.

In the 1990s, a plan was adopted to build a second control house on the northern side of 72nd Street, within what is known as Verdi Square. This plan had problems, however. As work began in early 2000, a plague of rats, whose underground habitat had been disturbed, swarmed Verdi Square itself.

Some people in the community also weren’t satisfied with the plan. According to the New York Times of June 17, 2000, some neighborhood residents felt that building a second entrance with new stairways wasn’t enough—that the platforms needed to be widened. The Transit Authority answered that this would be too cost-prohibitive, but they would make those platforms longer.

The Times of the following day also reported that then-Assemblyman Scott Stringer, now the city’s comptroller, was worried that closing parts of 72nd Street or Broadway during construction would send buses and trucks into the narrow local streets, causing accidents.

Finally, Community Board 4 protested that plans for local trains to temporarily skip stops between 42nd and 72nd streets during late-night hours could inconvenience some Fordham University and John City College students and personnel, as well as patients and staff at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital.

Somehow, the work got done and the new control house was ready at the end of October 2002. The design was modeled after the original on the south side, with modern-day updates. This new entrance has two staircases and one elevator going down to each platform. In addition, due to renovations, the original control house now has five staircases, two to the southbound platform and three to the northbound one.