Exploring location files
Back when I was nothing but a little toy shitbag scrawling ugly graffiti, RIS crew was running rampant in the subways, painting every tunnel in town. Today, a lot of their stuff is faded, though JA still drops the occasional bomb. There is one spot in particular though that still has some great RIS crew stuff, and this page is a quick tip of the hat to those who Rocked This Shit back in the day, inspiring me to check out tunnels for myself.
What lays beyond this door?
History
There is a little known subway provision just north of 57th street & 7th avenue station on the present day N/Q/R lines.
North of the station, all present subway service goes down into 2 tracks leading to Queens. However, these 2 track are surrounded by 4 trackways which extend north to Central Park South, and curves slightly to the west. This tunnel was built by the BMT in the 1920s to show how the route could naturally extend into the Central Park West subway line that was only a proposal at the time. In the wake of the BMT’s bankruptcy as a result of the Malbone Street disaster, the contract to build and operate this new west side line went to the IND.
Even after the unification of the BMT, IRT and IND in 1940, no effort was ever made to connect this provision to the west side line. Instead, two of the 4 trackways were eventually connected to the 63rd street tunnel. At present, these tracks are only used by detouring R trains, or to park and turn the occasional Q or N train. For a short time, the connection to the 63rd street tunnel hosted a special S shuttle train. These tracks will eventually host the Q train when the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway opens.
Adventure
This spot just plain frustrates me.
When I first walked past it one early morning, it was not the main objective of the mission I was on, thus entering would have been a distraction. Furthermore, we had already seen plenty of homeless people abound, and this place featured a long hallway into who knows where that was full or hobo bits and scurrying rats, along with the smell of bum juice and rotting meat. Not exactly what you want to go play with at 6AM on a Sunday…
PinkSmith & Other Graff
So it took me awhile to get back to this spot. I had heard that HOU (nypd homeless outreach unit) had clear the bums out, but what I didn’t anticipate was that the MTA would gate up the entrance and clean the place up real good. I found myself kicking myself for not holding my nose, stepping over the human debris and sleeping zombie corpses, to check this place out when I had the chance.
One day I will get to see every part of this spot, but clearly, that won’t be soon…
The gated off area. Today it is filled with ventilation equipment, though you can plainly see the pillars that formed trackways curving to the west.
Amtrak’s trains running along the former yard in the early 1990’s. Today this area is covered by high rise buildings.
A long time ago, a pussy-grabbing con man and his investor friends bought the former N.Y. Central RR rail yards which once lay just south of the freedom tunnel. The tracks here were abandoned in the 1980s when Conrail stopped servicing the area for some shortsighted reason. All yard tracks were pulled and the land became an open field of tall weeds and, along the water, shattered remains of piers and float bridges.
As we all know, Amtrak revived this line for service into Penn Station from the north, and in the later 1990s, the real estate people bought air rights from Amtrak to connect their property to the streets of the upper west side. In doing so, they were able to build the foundations for their buildings above the tracks.
Today, Amtrak still runs through this new tunnel. A single trackway/space runs next to this tunnel devoid of life. A large space was created and rumored to have been a planned station for this transit route which never came to be.
Scenes from the new tunnel
So far as I’m concerned, there is only one bridge in NYC that matters. Only one bridge worth climbing. Only one bridge shrouded in more ghost stories and urban legends than you could fit into a 200 page issue of Weird NJ. Entire movies have been written about this bridge. Hell Gate Bridge. This is its story.
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Witness the photos above, and get an education in handstyle circa 1985 – to find a room that is still decorated like this in the year 2005 is utterly baffling.
This is another MTA exhaust ventilation fan plant construction site. This project, costing nearly $30 million dollars, involves the expansion of yet another preexisting fan plant to better remove smoke and increase air circulation within an MTA Subway tunnel.
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What is the “Sea Honk”? And how many red pills do you have to take before you finally find it, whatever it is?
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In the spring of 2001, the MTA proposed the construction of this fan plant. The construction consists of a large hole, 70 feet deep, ripped open cut-and-cover style below a local Manhattan street. This location had previously contained an MTA subway emergency exit with an extra ancillary space constructed specifically for future utility use such as this.
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