The Best and Worst of Brooklyn Subway Stations
After two years of construction, the Smith Street station on the F/G lines will re-open this Friday. Notable for being—at a height of 88 feet—the world’s highest subway station, the stop has been undergoing a complete overhaul that F/G passengers have been privy to as their trains have rumbled out of the tunnels and onto the elevated tracks that arc over the Gowanus Canal like the knobbed spine of a brontosaurus skeleton. From what I’ve been able to see, the renovations are a vast aesthetic improvement and will render the Smith St stop into one of the nicest ones in Brooklyn.
Which, for the most part, subway stops are only ever really noticed if they’re particularly nice or particularly terrible. Most stops aren’t really anything except rat-infested way stations where we spend the seemingly endless minutes waiting by reading saved tweets or perusing two-month-old New Yorkers or avoiding eye-contact with the creepy guy sporting a cell-phone holster who advises, “You sure are lucky they caught that cannibal cop, you’re just his type.” Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s just what I do.
Anyway, the point is that most subway stations are the same—uniform in their relative dilapidated states, without being exceptional one way or another. The following stations, though, are unique for better or for worse.