86th Street station (New York Central Railroad)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

86th Street station was an abandoned stop in the Park Avenue Tunnel on the New York Central’s Harlem Line. It stood at Park Avenue and 86th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The station opened on May 15, 1876, as part of a major underground improvement project that moved several Harlem Line tracks below ground between Grand Central and the Harlem River.

The station had two side platforms and four tracks, with waiting rooms at the north end of each platform and a small ticket office accessible from a mezzanine at the south end. It mainly served local trains to Tuckahoe and White Plains, while nearby stations handled other routes.

86th Street was officially closed in 1901. The New York Central received permission to abandon the station (and the nearby 72nd Street station) in April 1901, and it was dropped from timetables by May 1901. Although some later reports mentioned locals stopping there, it never reopened as a regular passenger stop.

Today the station survives only as an emergency exit within the Park Avenue Tunnel; the staircases remain in the median of Park Avenue. The platforms were about 172 feet long and 18.7 feet wide, with two side platforms on the inside of the outer tunnels.