34th Street - Herald Square Station Multi-Level

34th Street - Herald Square Station Multi-Level

[For best viewing, please use full magnification and F11 Full-Screen View]

A large part of my fascination with the New York City Subway system begins even before setting foot on a
train…or comes after a day or night of subterranean exploration…especially when point of entry to the world
beneath those bustling streets is in a multilevel complex such as the huge 34th Street-Herald Square station.

Here, beneath several square blocks in Midtown Manhattan, where Broadway snakes diagonally across Sixth Avenue on its way to its meeting with Seventh at Times Square, the express and local tracks of the BMT Broadway Line N, Q, R, and W trains cross above the IND Sixth Avenue local and express tracks serving the B, D, F, and M trains. And there is even a connection with the 33rd Street terminus of the PATH system, with its own multiple tracks and platforms serving trains to both Hoboken and Journal Square in New Jersey.

The station is made all the larger and more complex by the fact that, just as Broadway and Sixth Avenue
meet on the diagonal, so do the tracks and platforms of the Broadway and Sixth Avenue Subway lines
on their respective levels, serving as they do their long eight- and ten-car trains.

In this view, one can see the mezzanine (*) just below the street entrances at the top, as well as the
various intermediate levels that connect to the lines mentioned above, and the escalators that connect
to the IND platforms at the lowest level of the complex.

While it is third-busiest station in the system with 39,672,507 passengers having entered the complex in 2017 (Wikipedia), this view, taken after midnight on a weekday, at the end of one of those late night Subway explorations, allows an unobstructed view of some of the complex underground architecture of this fascinating station.

©2018 Steve Ember
(*)