Ephemeral New York

On busy 125th Street, it’s a lilliputian train depot, with a delicate blond-brick facade and a white cornice trimmed in terra cotta.

It’s so small, it looks like it’s hiding under the massive steel viaduct that carries Metro-North rail cars above Park Avenue to Grand Central Terminal in one direction and beyond Manhattan to Westchester in the other.

But once you walk inside, you’ll find yourself in a roomy rail station with a wall of ticket counters and a spacious waiting room straight out of the Gilded Age.

Oak paneling covers the walls, soft globes glow with light overhead, and the tiled floor and antique iron radiators give the feel of a late 19th century depot in a small village, not a major city.

The interesting thing is, despite the date “1897” carved into the entryway, what’s now known as the Metro North Harlem-125th Street station is not an actual relic dating back to the Gilded Age—not exactly.

Though some of its components are original, it’s considered a 1990s “replica” of the train station built by the New York Central and Hudson River Railroads on this spot in 1897—when Harlem was shaking off its agrarian village past and joining the urban city.

In a review just before the 1897 station opened, The New York Times deemed it a big plus for Harlem residents.

“Passing through the tiled vestibule, one enters a spacious waiting room, 40 feet broad by 70 feet long, containing comfortable benches,” wrote The Times. “In one corner of the room is an information bureau, parcel room, and bicycle rack, while in the opposite corner is the telegraph and telephone office.”

“Back of the waiting room is a gentlemen’s smoking room and toilet, fitted with marble basins and plumbing of the latest approved pattern,” continued the Times.

The smoking room is gone, alas. But this recreation of the 1897 station is the latest in a series of railroad stops or actual stations at Park Avenue and 125th Street.

Park Avenue, then known as Fourth Avenue, had train tracks running at street level through lower Manhattan since 1831. Besides being noisy and unsightly, the street-grade tracks were extremely dangerous to pedestrians.

“The tracks extended north to Harlem at street level in 1837, and by 1860 trains struck a person or an animal almost every week, according to news reports of the time,” wrote Tina Kelley in a 1999 New York Times article. “The tracks were then lowered below street level north of 116th Street.”

To accommodate passengers getting on the sub-level trains at 125th Street, a new station was constructed in 1874, according to Joseph Brennan of Columbia University’s Abandoned Stations website. (The fourth image, above, shows what the new station was supposed to look like.)

Read the rest of the article here.