Why is there a plate girder in the street?
The easy answer is that there’s a subway line below – this is the Q train at Beverley Road – but that’s not really an explanation. The building on the right, obscured by the fence, is an ornate little train station, more suited to a small town on a branch railroad then the subway in Brooklyn.
The longer answer is that the subways in southern Brooklyn have their origins as excursion railroads to take city-dwellers to the beaches. The Q train, officially the Brighton Line, was the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railway in 1878. It was a railroad, not mass transit, with steam engines pulling passenger cars on grade-level tracks past the then-small-town of Flatbush. As Brooklyn grew, and joined Greater New York in 1898, the railroad was converted to more ordinary transit use and put in an open cut between 1905 and 1920. The stations along the cut are notable for being below-grade but open-air, and are exited via small head houses like the one not quite visible in the picture above.
It’s interesting to compare an old map (Robinson’s Atlas of King’s County, 1890, courtesy of the NYPL) to the current situation. The street layout barely changed, but the names did. [Click to enlarge.]
Avenue A is now Albemarle Road, Avenue B is now Beverley Road, and Avenue C is now Cortelyou Road. (Hey, it’s almost like there’s a pattern there.) The picture above is taken where the railroad (“Brooklyn and Brighton Beach R.R.) crossed Avenue B at grade.
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