Transfer from the T to the O at 14th Street: Subway Plans in the East Village Past, Present, and Future

The subway is our city’s circulation system, one that needs to work efficiently and grow and evolve to meet the needs of all New Yorkers. After years of expansion in the first half of the 20th century, the subway system actually contracted in the mid-to-late 20th century, with several elevated subway lines dismantled during this period, including in our neighborhoods. Many of these lost lines were supposed to the replaced by new below-ground lines, but progress on long-promised projects has been slow. One such project is the as-yet-unfunded latest phase of the Second Avenue Subway, which would connect the 96th Street station on the Upper East Side with 125th Street and Park Avenue.

While the new extension would add service in Upper Manhattan, the full Second Avenue line has been in the works for almost a century to improve travel the length of Manhattan (and in some iterations beyond). That includes the East Village, where plans for the route have been proposed, started, and put on hold for decades. 

In the early part of the 20th century, the East Village was well served by rail travel, with the Second and Third Avenue elevateds overhead and the Lexington Avenue line below just to the neighborhood’s west. (The Second Avenue el actually ran on First Avenue through the East Village up to 23rd Street.) With work proceeding on the new IND division of the subway in the 1920s — today’s Sixth and Eighth Avenue lines — the city’s Board of Transportation proposed further subway expansion in 1929, including a Second Avenue line to replace the aging East Side elevateds. (The Second Avenue el was demolished in 1942, the Third Avenue in 1955.)

Construction on Sixth and Eighth Avenues anticipated that expansion, known as the “Second System,” and can be seen today in two major stops in NoHo and Greenwich Village. At the Second Avenue station on the present-day F line, the mezzanine was built with a gap that left room for a line proceeding along the avenue. The station also features two mostly unused center tracks that would have connected with one new Second System line in Brooklyn. Another planned Second System line through Brooklyn and Queens would have used a stop on South 4th Street in Williamsburg as a major transfer point; to avoid confusion for travelers, transit planners named the IND’s major connection point in Greenwich Village West 4th Street, making it the only numbered station in Manhattan with a direction.

Unfortunately, that Second System and its Second Avenue line never came to fruition. The Great Depression, World War II, and the underfunding of urban transit all put a stop to further construction, even as more proposals for the route were announced over the decades. The next time any real action took place for the Second Avenue line was in the “Program for Action,” a guiding document for new transit projects released by the MTA when it was established in 1968. The plan offered a map featuring a new, blue T line on Second Avenue from South Ferry in Lower Manhattan to the northern reaches of the Bronx. 

The initial outline for the T featured stations spaced farther apart than with previous lines, skipping the Lower East Side and East Village entirely. In response to protests, the “Program for Action” map was revised to include an orange O line, a so-called “cup handle” with stops at Second Avenue and 14th Street, First Avenue and 14th Street, Avenue A or C (reports vary), and the present-day Second Avenue station.

Actual construction on the Second Avenue subway started in 1972 between 99th and 105th Streets, followed the next year by sections between 110th and 120th Streets as well as under Chrystie Street in Chinatown. In July 1974, “Mayor Beame returned to his old neighborhood on the Lower East Side,” The New York Times wrote, “joining with Governor Wilson in a rattling good time, both manning jackhammers to break ground for the fourth segment of the Second Avenue Subway,” a section between Second and Ninth Streets. Work was finally under way on the new line.

Two years later, the fiscal crisis hit New York, almost bankrupting the city. Work in the East Village and the other three sections was halted, and the MTA announced that work would be delayed “until about 1986 because costs have spiraled greatly.” Progress on Second Avenue didn’t resume until about three decades later in the 2000s, and the first phase of the Second Avenue subway was opened to the subway-riding public on New Year’s Day 2017. Now, Phase 2 in East Harlem is in search of funding. A third phase would extend the route downtown to Houston Street and establish the turquoise T line first announced in 1968. Unfortunately, the MTA has said that the extension is not a priority. 

As Gothamist noted, “By the time the MTA came back to the Second Avenue Subway in the 2000s, it began by building three stops on the Upper East Side — and promised that, one day, it would run downtown.” Unfortunately for the East Village and surrounding communities, “for now, that day is not in sight.”