GOTHAMIST / WNYC

By Ramsey Khalifeh

East Harlem leaders and community advocates are calling for a passageway between the neighborhood’s incoming Second Avenue subway extension and its Metro-North stop by repurposing a long abandoned railroad station, but MTA leaders said they have no plans to move forward with the idea.

The agency already plans to build an expanded subway station at 125th Street and Park Avenue as part of its project to bring the Q line into East Harlem, and last month inked a contract to begin tunneling. Early renderings from the agency show the overhauled subway station will connect the new segment of the Q line to the 4, 5 and 6 lines under a shiny glass building. But under the MTA’s current plan, riders would have to go outside to get between the commuter railroad station and the subways.

Elected officials and local community groups have for years called for an “uptown Grand Central” that houses both subways and Metro-North trains under a single roof like the one in Midtown. They said the MTA could accomplish that by building out a forgotten 19th century station beneath the lobby of the existing Metro-North station.

“We want it to be a transportation hub, like an uptown Grand Central hub that will connect straphangers and riders to Metro-North, to express bus service, to LaGuardia Airport, to future water transportation both in the Harlem River as well as the Hudson River,” said Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who represents the neighborhood. "We'll leave that up to the MTA and see whether it meets budget goals.”

MTA officials said the idea to repurpose the abandoned station isn’t feasible. They noted the Second Avenue subway project is already repurposing old underground infrastructure, like a tunnel dug out in the 1970s when the agency last tried to build a new subway in East Harlem.

But community advocates saw the lack of connection as a missed opportunity.

The abandoned station is a remnant from the bygone New York and Harlem Railroad that ran in an open trench through the neighborhood. People on foot or in horse-drawn carriages could see trains on the line from the street above before the tracks were replaced by the elevated Park Avenue viaduct near the turn of the 20th century.

“I live just a block away and so to stumble across something that you never knew was there was pretty magical,” said Carey King, a program director for the local advocacy group Uptown Grand Central who's toured the abandoned station. “We got to go down stairs and you could see where the columns used to be … It really was like being transported back in time.”

King said she wants the abandoned space to be fitted out with retail shops and public art installations.

Over the last decade, the MTA held outreach meetings with local groups and elected officials including King and Espaillat to talk about the subway extension. During those meetings, Espaillat said he learned the abandoned station was connected to a much larger underground cavern that stretches between 115th and 130th streets.

According to research by Columbia University scholar Joseph Brennan, private railroad companies used the station for about 20 years before it was replaced by the current elevated Harlem-125 Street Metro North station in 1897. A New York Times article from that year described the new elevated viaduct as a major improvement.

“For many years the Harlem patrons of the two railroads [New York and Harlem Railroads] were obliged to use a small, dingy station down in the old Park Avenue cut, where the trains formerly ran,” the article stated. “Directly under the [new] station is a large cellar, formed by that portion of the old cut which has not been filled in. This has been cemented, and here are steam-heating and electric-lighting plants. A portion of this cellar will be transformed into a vault for the storage of books and papers belonging to the company.”

While advocates like Espaillat and King call for the MTA to at long last repurpose that abandoned space, many other area residents were skeptical transit officials would take seriously their suggestion to create a grand hub in East Harlem where city subways directly connect to suburban commuter railroads.

RanDe Rogers, co-owner of a Caribbean restaurant on 124th Street, suggested government officials wouldn’t make that kind of investment a block away from one of the city’s safe injection sites, where people can use drugs in a controlled environment without fearing police intervention.

“To act like this is a city that is okay with co-locating drug users, and in such a location to skyrocket security, is going to somehow care what we want on the walls of our train station is just a bit laughable,” Rogers said.

He argued the public investment needed in East Harlem, one of Manhattan’s poorest neighborhoods, goes far beyond a new train station.