The BMT Franklin Avenue Line (also known as the Brighton–Franklin Line) is a rapid transit line of the New York City Subway in Brooklyn, New York, running between Franklin Avenue and Prospect Park. Service is full-time, and provided by the Franklin Avenue Shuttle. The line serves the neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, and allows for easy connections between the Fulton Street Line and the Brighton Line.
The line was originally part of the Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railway, which was created to connect Downtown Brooklyn with Coney Island. This Franklin Avenue Line opened in 1878 as part of the railway. Trains continued via the Long Island Rail Road to get to Downtown Brooklyn. In 1896, a connection was built with the Fulton Street Elevated, providing direct service to Manhattan. In 1905 and 1906, the line was elevated near Park Place to eliminate the last remaining grade crossings.
In 1913, the line was acquired by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT), which consolidated various railroad lines in Brooklyn. As part of the Dual Contracts of 1913, the BRT planned to connect the Brighton Line to a more direct subway route under Flatbush Avenue as part of Contract 4. The worst rapid transit wreck in the New York City Subway's history, the Malbone Street Wreck, occurred on November 1, 1918, when a five-car wooden elevated train derailed while approaching the Prospect Park station, killing at least 93 people. In 1920, the Franklin Avenue Line was severed from the Fulton Street Elevated, and Brighton Line trains started using the new subway under Flatbush Avenue.
The line's condition deteriorated in the 1980s and 1990s, and as a result it was nearly abandoned. One station, Dean Street, was closed in 1995 due to low ridership. After pleas from the local community and transit advocacy groups, the MTA agreed to spend $74 million to rehabilitate the line. The line was closed for eighteen months in 1998 and 1999, during which the track layout was changed and the stations were rebuilt.
History
Origins
What is now the Franklin Avenue Line was part of the modern-day Brighton Beach Line until 1920, when the two lines were split north of Prospect Park. The Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railway (BF&CI), which built the Brighton Line, was incorporated in 1877 in order to connect Downtown Brooklyn with the hotels and resorts at Coney Island, Manhattan Beach, and Brighton Beach. The line opened on July 1, 1878, originally running from the Willink Plaza entrance of Prospect Park at Flatbush Avenue and Ocean Avenue to the Brighton Beach Hotel. However, the railroad desired to get the line closer to downtown Brooklyn. There was a problem: the line could not pass through Prospect Park, since the park had been built specifically as a retreat from the busyness of New York City. Therefore, the line was to be built in a trench through the hill in Crown Heights, connecting with the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) at Atlantic Avenue. The route was built on the surface between Bedford Terminal (at Atlantic Avenue) and Park Place, and was built in an open cut to Prospect Park and beyond to Church Avenue in Flatbush in order to avoid grade crossings and to placate the local community. This portion of the Brighton Beach Line represented a routing compromise, since the bypass route through Crown Heights was long, while the BF&CI's preferred direct routing to Downtown Brooklyn would have measured only . The Crown Heights routing took the BF&CI north to the Bedford station of the LIRR. This portion of the BF&CI's mainline would become the Franklin Avenue Line. Later on, in order to accommodate larger locomotives for LIRR through-service, the open cut had to be dug deeper.
This portion formally opened on August 19, 1878, about six weeks after the rest of the Brighton Line opened. This portion of the Brighton Beach Line went north to the LIRR's Bedford station, where Brighton trains could merge onto LIRR tracks and operate to the Flatbush Avenue Terminal at Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic Avenue. However, the LIRR later gained control of the New York and Manhattan Beach Railway, a competitor of the BF&CI, and on December 14, 1883, ended the agreement to provide equal access to the Flatbush Avenue Terminal. The BF&CI was forced to end its trains at Bedford, a situation which led to its bankruptcy in 1884. Three years later, the BF&CI line was reorganized as the Brooklyn and Brighton Beach Railroad.