New York Transit Museum - The Station

The Station

Court Street station was built as a terminus for local trains of the IND Fulton Street Line and opened on April 9, 1936, along with a long section of the Fulton Street Line and the Rutgers Street Tunnel. The station has one center island platform with two tracks. The tracks end at bumper blocks just beyond the west end of the platform. A tile band of Aquamarine with a Cerulean Blue border is set in a course two tiles high, as is the case at most local stations.

The station demonstrated the IND service theory that specified that local trains should operate within individual boroughs where possible and provide transfers to express trains, which would be through-routed between the boroughs. Court Street was to be the northern terminal of the HH Fulton Street Local, which would run south to Euclid Avenue. Additionally, one of the plans for the Second Avenue Subway would have included a southern extension to Brooklyn, tying into the stub at Court Street to accommodate through service from Manhattan.

The HH through service was never inaugurated; the only trains to the station were part of the Court Street Shuttle, taking passengers from Court Street to the transfer station at Hoyt–Schermerhorn Streets. Due to the proximity of other stations in the Downtown Brooklyn area, as well as the need to transfer to reach it, Court Street never saw much service and was abandoned on June 1, 1946. However, it is still a functioning subway station; trains are moved into and out of the exhibits using the line between here and Hoyt–Schermerhorn station's outer two tracks.

Around 1960, the station began to be used as a set for movies, most notably the 1974 film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and the entrance at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street was reopened for shoots. To this day, the station and its connecting tunnels are still used for movie shoots. The 2009 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a remake of the 1974 movie, was also filmed there. More recently, the museum appeared in the Life on Mars episode "The Simple Secret of the Note In Us All", where a newspaper columnist is found murdered on a subway car. The Museum remains open to requests to use the station for filming, as well as to host private events during hours the Museum is not normally open.

• Street Entrance

• Bumper Block at end of Track 2