Avenue H (BMT Brighton Line)

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New York City Subway station Avenue H

Station information
Line	BMT Brighton Line
Services	Q
Platforms	2 side platforms
Tracks	4
Other
Borough	Brooklyn
Opened	1907
Next north	Newkirk Avenue Q
Next south	Avenue J Q

Avenue H is a station on the BMT Brighton Line of the New York City Subway. Located at Avenue H between East 15th and East 16th Streets in the planned community of Fiske Terrace, Brooklyn, it is served by the Q train at all times. The campus of Brooklyn College is nearby.

There are four tracks and two side platforms. The The ~620 foot (~189m) platform accommodates full-length trains typically composed of eight 75 foot (22.86m) or ten 60 foot (18.29 m) cars. The station is located at a transitional point on the right-of-way. North of the station, the roadbed ramps down to an open-cut. South of the station, the line is on a raised earthen embankment. The station platforms are slightly above ground level.

[edit] Landmarked station house

The station was opened around 1900 as "Fiske Terrace," a two-track surface station serving the new planned community of Fiske Terrace in Midwood, Brooklyn. The station house, also known as the headhouse, through which the station is entered, is a landmarked wood frame structure built in 1905 as a real estate office of the T.B. Ackerson Company to sell homes in the new community. It was converted to railroad use in 1907, at the same time that the station was renamed "Avenue H."

In 2003, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans to demolish the structure, citing its wood construction as a fire hazard. The community intervened, emphasizing the building's historic importance, architectural significance, connecting to the adjacent community and the fact that several other wooden station houses on the subway system had been given landmark status earlier.

On June 29, 2004, the station house was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. This allows renovations inside, but preserves the major structure and exterior. The contract to "restore the landmark station control house" as well as rehabilitation of the platforms and other stations structures was advertised for bids by the MTA for January 2007.

The official designation report describes the building:

The Avenue H station on the BMT line [...] is the city’s only shingled wooden cottage turned transit station house. Often compared to a country train stop, it originally served as a real estate sales office for developer Thomas Benton Ackerson to sell property in the adjacent neighborhood of Fiske Terrace, an early twentieth century example of planned suburban development. The structure, with a hipped and flared roof and wraparound porch, evokes in miniature the area’s Colonial Revival and Queen Anne houses. After nearly a century of commuter traffic, the Avenue H station remains in service and retains much historic fabric, from a corbelled chimney to peeled log porch columns. It is one of a very small number of wood-frame station houses surviving in the modern subway system, the only station adapted from a structure built for another function, and the only surviving station from Brooklyn’s once-extensive network of surface train lines, which had originally attracted Ackerson and numerous other developers to the area."[1]PDF (3.60 MiB)