Full service is set to resume Monday on the Franklin Ave. Shuttle in Brooklyn, following a month-long closure of the four-stop line’s northern terminal to replace a damaged portion of the elevated track.
The work — which replaced a half-block long bridge at St. Marks Ave. in Crown Heights along with new tracks and a new third rail — is the first major construction on the line since it was renovated in the 1990s after a decade’s long community campaign to save the line from demolition.
“In our system, we inspect, on a regular basis, every inch of structure, all the time,” Jamie Torres-Springer, the MTA’s head of construction and development, told the Daily News during a tour of the worksite last week.
Evan Simko-Bednarski
MTA work crews inspect the newly installed tracks at St. Marks Ave. (Evan Simko-Bednarski)
Those inspections found that the steel of a small, 1905-vintage truss bridge, running between apartment buildings between St. Marks Ave. and Prospect Place, was corroded enough to warrant replacement.
“We could fix this, try to rehabilitate all this steel, but in the end it made more sense just to replace the old truss [bridge,]” Torres-Springer said.
That work has taken a little over a month, as crews with construction firm RCC built a new, girder-style bridge in the 1905 structure’s place, and ran new tracks, walkways and third-rails over St. Marks Ave.
The Franklin Ave. Shuttle, which runs from the southern end of Prospect Park up to the Franklin Ave. station at Fulton St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant, has been running a truncated route for the past month, terminating at the Park Place station just south of the work site.
Evan Simko-Bednarski
Crews installed a new steel viaduct and all-new track at St. Marks Ave. in Crown Heights last month, replacing a deteriorated structure from 1905. The track will reopen Monday. (Evan Simko-Bednarski)
“We had to replace this entire thing because the structure deteriorated,” Torres-Springer said. “We were not able to maintain the structure’s condition over the years.”
The construction boss said his department will be budgeting for more structural repair work in the coming five-year capital plan, in an effort to address structural defects before then necessitate major service shutdowns.
Torres-Springer’s team has identified roughly 60,000 such defects throughout the subway system that it aims to address. The department currently plans to address rust and apply overcoating to 19 miles of the system’s 65 elevated miles.
The MTA shut the line down Saturday and Sunday to run test trains along the length of the Franklin Ave. line, ahead of a planned 5 a.m. reopening of full service Monday morning.
Some 15,000 straphangers ride the Franklin Ave. Shuttle on the average weekday, according to MTA data.
Glancing at a subway map, it’s easy to dismiss the Franklin Ave. Shuttle — one of three such lines too short to warrant its own numbered or lettered bullet from the Transit Authority — as a relatively inconsequential piece of Gotham’s massive subway system.
But the four-stop, mile-and-a-half line is an important one in rapid-transit history.
The Franklin Ave. shuttle pre-dates the subway by 36 years, having begun life in 1878 as a portion of the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad. The brick tunnel under Eastern Parkway just north of the shuttle’s Botanic Garden stop is the oldest tunnel in the New York City subway system.
Evan Simko-Bednarski
New construction on Atlantic Ave, as seen from the Franklin Ave. trackbed. When the MTA sought to shutter the line in the 1980s, residents argued the line was vital to the growth of the neighborhood.(Evan Simko-Bednarski)
The line became part of the consolidated Brooklyn Rapid Transit company in 1896, and it was a BRT train of wooden cars on what would become the Franklin Ave. line that flew off the rails in 1918, slamming into the side of a tunnel under Malbone Street—now Empire Blvd.— just north of the Prospect Park station.
That wreck killed at least 93 passengers — it is, to date, the deadliest in New York City subway history — and forced changes in subway car construction, signaling and controls.
But for those Crown Heights residents who rely on the shuttle to connect them to the city — riders can transfer to eight other subway lines across the shuttle’s four stops — the shuttle’s most historic chapter was the fight to keep it standing.
“It’s the glue that holds the community together,” said Fred Monderson, 75, who’s lived on Park Pl. in Crown Heights for 47 years.
Monderson, a three-decade veteran of Brooklyn’s Community Board 8, was one of a broad coalition of activists who fought to save the shuttle from being decommissioned in the 1980s and 90s.
At that time, much of elevated structure carrying the train north of Park Place was more than 75 years old — remnants of a 1905 overhaul whose structures were quickly showing their age.
By the early 80s, The News reported on the shuttle under the headline “Doomsday Express,” given the woeful state of the track. Others called it the “Ghost Train,” given how infrequently it arrived.
“Go for a ride on the Franklin Ave. Shuttle in Brooklyn,” one 1981 article in this paper began, “and see the death of the subway system.”
Cracks in the retaining walls under the Franklin Ave. station, rickety wooden stations, pervasive fare jumping, and a $38 million repair bill led MTA brass to suggest closing the line and replacing it with a bus route in the early 1980s.
“There was significant deterioration of the line,” recalled Joe Rappaport, who headed the Straphangers’ Campaign, a riders advocacy group, in the 1980s and 90s.
Evan Simko-Bednarski
A flyer from 1993, when local community activists joined the Straphangers Campaign to call on the MTA to replace the line rather than demolish it. (Evan Simko-Bednarski)
When the MTA proposed to take the line down, a broad coalition of local community boards, transit advocates, business groups and a local church pushed back.
“We went to an MTA board meeting with students from one of the local high schools,” Rappaport recalled. “We had tombstones with the names of the stations. The MTA chairman at the time said, ‘well, you could take the bus.’”
Monderson and his fellow activists felt that Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the historically black neighborhoods served by the shuttle, were less important to the MTA’s leadership at the time.
“The MTA was downsizing, they were cutting service in the minority communities,” he said.
The campaign to save the shuttle took nearly two decades, and snowballed to include local elected officials and politicians in Albany. It involved leafleting campaigns calling attention to maintenance money being spent at stations that weren’t nearly as neglected as the shuttle stops.
In the end, the coalition won, and transit officials agreed to rebuild the line in the mid 90s.
“The MTA is not easily convinced,” Monderson said. “But if you mobilize — Do you know how many hearings I went to, to speak at?”
“Part of it was, I think we wore the MTA down,” Rappaport said.
The Franklin Ave. Shuttle was shut down for a major overhaul in July 1998.
By the time the line reopened in 1999 — minus a decommissioned and ultimately dismantled station at Dean St. — the repair costs the MTA had sought to avoid in the 1980’s had ballooned to $74 million.
From the tracks above St. Marks Ave, last week, a News reporter could make out the skeletal structure of a new residential tower taking shape along Atlantic Ave. to the north. Directly east — close enough for the construction equipment to shake as the shuttle’s R-68 cars lumber by — another new residential building was being erected near Franklin Ave.
From the shuttle’s fresh tracks, views of new apartments — one of New York’s oldest stories: build transit and new buildings will come
As for Monderson, he said he doesn’t ride the shuttle much anymore these days.
“I’m not as swift as I used to be,” he said with a laugh.
The train is still on his mind, though. Monderson said he wants to lobby the MTA once again — this time for a plaque along the line to recognize the community activists who kept it alive.
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