59th Street is an express station on the BMT Fourth Avenue Line of the New York City Subway. Located at 59th Street and Fourth Avenue, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park, it is served by the N and R trains at all times.
This is the southernmost four-track express station with two island platforms. The local tracks continue along Fourth Avenue to Bay Ridge – 95th Street while the express tracks turn east to become the tracks of the BMT Sea Beach Line. South of the station are diamond crossovers between both the local and express tracks in both directions.
The N normally stops at the express tracks since it provide express service to Manhattan via the Manhattan Bridge, while the R stops at the local ones and provide service to Lower Manhattan via the Montague Street Tunnel. During late nights, N trains use the crossovers to switch between the local tracks and the Sea Beach tracks (making all stops in place of the R train, through Lower Manhattan via the Montague Street Tunnel) while northbound R shuttle trains use the crossovers as well to switch from the local track to the express track in order to short turn at 36th Street.
The street-level entrance is at the southern end of the station, at 60th Street. There is also an exit at the north end of the station. This station was overhauled in the late 1970s.
Immediately south of the station, one can see tunnel stub headings running straight from the local tracks. They run for about 150 feet and would have been for a line to Staten Island via the Staten Island Tunnel under The Narrows, which was aborted by Mayor Hylan before it was completed. There is a Maintenance of Way shed that was built on the southbound trackway. The northbound trackway is unobstructed, albeit much darker. The northbound trackway ends on a brick wall, with evidence of some sort of space beyond. South of this station, the bridge over the LIRR Bay Ridge Branch has four trackways, with the R train occupying the two western ones. The tracks of the BMT Fourth Avenue Line are under the western half of Fourth Avenue at this point so that two additional tracks could be laid in the future if traffic ever warranted it.
Portions of what was to be two additional tracks for the Fourth Avenue subway south of this station were constructed by the then Brooklyn Edison Company initially for use as circuit breaker chambers.
The Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a major architectural landmark of Brooklyn, is nearby.
Famous quotes containing the words street, fourth and/or avenue:
“You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . .”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)