History of the L

When Hurricane Sandy struck the New York City metropolitan area and most of the northeast coast on October 29, 2012, billions of dollars in destruction were caused. Among Sandy’s consequences was damage to the tunnels carrying mass transit lines under the Hudson, East and Harlem Rivers as well as Newtown Creek. Many of the railroad and subway lines using these tunnels had service disruptions to repair the damage that salt water did to the electrical conduits and walls in the tunnels. The Montague Street Tunnel, which carries the R train between Brooklyn and Manhattan, was out of service between August 2013 and September 2014. While passengers using the R train had numerous relatively convenient alternatives, such as the B, D and N trains using the Manhattan Bridge, “customers” of the L train, which until recently had its own proposed tunnel closure to run for 15 months beginning in April 2019, had just a direct connection to the G train at Lorimer St., which doesn’t enter Manhattan but connects to the E , M and 7 trains at Court Square.

In early 2019, former governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the closure of the tunnel wouldn’t be necessary and “new technologies” would be employed to prevent the tunnel closure, but not without severe service disruptions on overnights and weekends. While the new plan was met with skepticism from many transit reporters, bloggers and advocates, the doomsayers were wrong and service was curtailed for much less time than originally planned.

A review of the history of the Canarsie Line follows, as much of the line took just eight years to complete—contrasting with the nine years required for the proposed tunnel repairs.

In an earlier era of subway construction, the bulk of what’s now called the L train was constructed between 1916 and 1924, an eight-year period, by a privately-owned entity known as Brooklyn Rapid Transit, which ran most of Brooklyn’s transit operations in the eastern part of the borough. After the Malbone Street Wreck in 1918, the BRT reorganized as Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (the BMT), which became part of the New York City transit system when the city purchased the Independent and Interborough subway lines in 1940.

The L train’s engineer in charge was Clifford Milburn Holland (1883-1924) who built many railroad and vehicular tunnels in the New York City area but didn’t live to see the Hudson River Tunnel named for him to fruition when it opened in 1927. The original line—which was called the #16, as BMT trains didn’t receive letter designations until the 1960s—ran between Union Square and the Montrose Ave. station, a convenient terminal in the line’s early days because new subway cars were delivered directly to the new line from the Long Island Rail Road Bushwick Branch, which terminated at Montrose Ave. and Bushwick Pl., a block away from the tunnel on Bushwick Ave. The LIRR still uses the Bushwick trackage for freight.

The original section of the L train was forced to take a convoluted route because of the street layout in Williamsburg, as engineers didn’t want to have to tunnel beneath building foundations. The tunnel runs under N. 7^th St., Metropolitan Ave., Bushwick Ave., McKibbin St., and Harrison Pl. before straightening its route beneath Wyckoff Ave. for the bulk of its Bushwick run.

In December 1928, the remainder of the L train’s underground stations between Morgan Ave. and East New York opened. The line turns south, briefly entering the borough of Queens (the Halsey St. station’s southbound platform is in Brooklyn, the northbound in Queens) and runs along the Bay Ridge Long Island Rail Road branch at grade and in a tunnel before emerging onto an elevated line just before reaching Broadway Junction in East New York.

Another interesting anomaly on the line is that because of the proximity of Trinity Cemetery at the Wilson Ave. station as well as the railroad, the subway station allows a look at the cemetery from the southbound platform, but not at the northbound, though both tracks are at grade level. The L train then ducks into a tunnel again at the Bushwick-Aberdeen station before emerging at Broadway Junction.

The subway mosaics in the underground stations, including the Montrose Ave. station shown here, are among the subways’ most colorful. When the Independent Subway was designed beginning in the mid-1920s, subway station architect and designer Squire Vickers knew that the subsequent IND stations would be monochrome and went all out with the Canarsie Line, including a rainbow of colors, eschewing the earth tones generally adhered to in previous IRT and BMT stations.

Gate crossing at East 105^th St. Photo: Joe Korman, nycsubway.org

The southernmost stations on the L train, running through East New York and terminating at Rockaway Parkway and Glenwood Rd. in Canarsie, began as a surface steam railroad line. Brooklyn’s other subway lines, the D, F, N and Q, also evolved from steam railroads that ran to seaside hotels such as the Brighton, Sea Beach and West End. In the 1910s, they became elevated lines with funding from the IRT-BMT Dual Contracts program, a vast effort that built most of the subway lines running today.

Originally, the Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach Railroad ran between the Long Island Rail Road and Jamaica Bay, where commuters could catch a ferry to the Rockaways. Service on this line began in October 1865. In those days the LIRR ran down the middle of Atlantic Ave. (as it would until it was elevated in spots, in a tunnel in others) and service branched south along Vesta Ave., now Van Sinderen Ave. The line was single-tracked until 1894 and then placed on an elevated line with an electrified third rail, and extended north to the elevated Broadway and Fulton Street lines in 1906. The line ran at grade to Rockaway Parkway, where commuters would transfer to a surface trolley that ran to today’s Rockaway Pier.

Further changes occurred first in 1928, when this elevated trestle was joined to the rest of the Canarsie Line. The trestle retained its connection to the elevated train over Broadway, today’s J train, and there was rush-hour service, known as the JJ train, connecting Canarsie with the Broadway tracks until 1968. The Fulton St. El service ended in 1956, but its trackage adjoining the Canarsie Line wasn’t fully dismantled until 2001.

A quirk on the Canarsie Line remained until 1973, the last gate crossing in the New York City subway system, allowing E. 105^th St. to cross the tracks at Turnbull Ave. Leftover trolley poles from the old surface line connection at Rockaway Parkway were never removed.

In June 1931, the Canarsie Line was extended one stop west, to 8^th Ave., which remains its northern terminal. The reason for the extension was that the IND 8^th Avenue Line, the first Independent line to open, was being prepared for service, which would commence in September 1932. This “new” 8^th Ave. station was designed to look like an IND station, with a bold blue color band and the distinctive lettering used in all other IND stations. A 1999 redesign effected a more “BMT”-ish look, with multi-colored mosaics. Whimsical sculptures by Tom Otterness were added to the staircases.

Today’s Canarsie Line was 66 years in the making, between 1865 and 1931.

—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY,  and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)