Many of the stations on the New York subway system have been upgraded over the years, cleaned up and adorned with artwork and location-specific decor. The Bleecker Street Station on the Lexington Avenue line is not one of them. It’s still quite spare and run-down, the supporting columns a bit rusty. As I waited for an uptown #6 train, I took this photograph looking along the tracks and platform:
Just afterwards, I looked across to the opposite platform and saw a young woman making a similar photograph, also looking uptown. Almost as quickly, a downtown #6 pulled into the station, and as the train pulled away, she was of course gone. A typical movie cliche, but our main purpose in this little station was to catch our trains to wherever it was were going next.
Nice shot.
Please becareful you don’t lose your footing and fall 🙁
This station is undergoing a major reconstruction and renovation right now, and is scheduled to be completed in November of 2011. That may be why the columns you photographed have been stripped of paint.
As part of the reconstruction, workers are building a connection from the B, D, F and V lines, up to the uptown 6. Until now, there was no uptown-side connection and travelers had to exit and reenter the station in order to transfer.
Here’s an article about the project, including renderings of the completed station:
http://secondavenuesagas.com/2009/07/16/inside-the-bleeckerbroadway-lafayette-construction/