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The phantom T stop
By adamg on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 8:07pm
If you peer into the ugly gray pillbox on the edge of the parking lot at Washington and Hayward Place, you can still see the tile "Essex" from back in the day when it was an entrance to the Essex stop on the Orange Line. No doubt there's a perfectly good reason the entrance (and the similar exit a bit down Essex) still exist even though the T moved the entrances to the "new" Chinatown stop in the 1980s. Like maybe, late at night, after the T's shut down, T elves use them to knit those seat covers for the Red and Orange lines.
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Comments
Same station, different name and entrance
The Chinatown stop is just a renaming of the old Essex stop. The entrances have also moved, but the platforms are where they have always been.
See, what I don't know about T history could fill a book
Thanks, fixed!
Station was renamed in 1987
when the Orange Line south of it was moved from the Washington Street elevated to the current Southwest Corridor alignment. The Washington station was renamed Downtown Crossing at the same time.
I don't know whether the entrances were moved before or after the renaming, though. Another disused entrance is visible, if you know where to look, next to Centerfolds on La Grange Street.
Another fun fact: until the mid-1960s, this station was actually called Essex on the northbound side but Boylston on the southbound.
Yes, there were several
Yes, there were several stations named like that on the Orange Line before the names started to get simplified back in the 60's: Essex/Boylston, Winter/Summer (which connected to the Washington stop on the Red Line), Milk/State (which connected to the Devonshire stop on the Blue Line), and Friend/Union (which connected to the Haymarket stop on the Green Line -- not that any of the lines were identified by color back then).
It's all because Washington St. is really just too narrow to run a subway line under, and so none of the stations properly lined up (except for Friend/Union, but by then I suppose the people in charge of names decided to hell with it) in order to cram everything in. Boylston and Copley are rather like that as well, but for whatever reason, they've always just had one name for the overall station. Even though that meant that there were two different Boylston stations about a block apart, on different lines.
Man, even underground we make things confusing! Go Boston!
Great stories
That's amazing, and I've never heard this background before. And so typically Bostonian: calling the same stop two completely opposite things depending on which side of the street you're entering from. Is this all documented somewhere on the interwebs? If not, it would make for a great book--I've only heard small fragments of public transit history, and I'd love to hear the full story about the A branch of the Green Line shutting down, or the subway to Dudley Square being replaced with the "Silver Line."
The original operator (the
The original operator (the Boston Elevated Street Railway or BERY) viewed them as distinct stations rather than separate entrances to one station. In many ways, the idea makes sense, as they did not originally have connections between the two sides, and in fact operated separately. Washington St. is so narrow, it's amazing that there is a subway there at all, and not surprisingly, it's a quirky one at that.
Another interesting fact from that era -- there was a second downtown branch of the line that would eventually become the Orange Line, which ran elevated above Atlantic Ave. I believe it was torn down prior to the artery being built, and for unrelated reasons, but that area had an El. of some sort for several decades. The Atlantic Ave. service split from the main line (Washington St.) just before Essex, roughly where Tufts Medical Center is today, then rejoined just before the Charlestown bridge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Avenue_Elevated
It's far from a book, but
It's far from a book, but Jonathan Belcher's Changes to Transit Service in the MBTA district (PDF), lists almost everything you would want to know about, well, changes to transit service in the MBTA district from 1964 to the present.
Relevant changes to this comment thread:
January 23, 1967:
Winter and Summer stations were renamed Washington.
February 11, 1967:
Boylston St. station was renamed Essex.
May 4, 1987:
Washington St. station was renamed Downtown Crossing.
May 4, 1987:
Essex station was renamed Chinatown.
I think it was renamed before 1987
I started sneaking into town with my friends (via the then brand new route 350 bus from Alewife) in the fall of 1986. Both Downtown Crossing and Chinatown stations had been renamed by then.