A fantastic two-level subway in New York was already a reality in the 19th century.
New York’s elevated railways, known as the L’s, once stretched over 80 meters across the five boroughs, acting as a “second city in the air” above the street gridlock. Built from the 1870s onward, this system quickly became essential, but its success eventually strained capacity at major transfer points, where expansion into the street was impossible. This constraint forced engineers to develop some of the most unusual solutions in American railroading by thinking vertically, resulting in the construction of double-decker elevated stations and trackways. The first famous example was the Chatham Square junction (1890s), a two-level station that separated local trains on the lower deck from express and through service above, which nearly doubled the capacity of the intersection. Another complex structure was the Queensboro Plaza (1916), hailed as “A Union station in the air” for its efficiency, featuring two full levels with four tracks each, allowing passengers to transfer between multiple lines without climbing a stair. These stacked designs were also applied to infrastructure like the Queensboro Bridge and ferry slips, enabling commuters to step directly from boats onto elevated platforms.
Despite their ingenuity and the ability to move far more trains by separating traffic flows vertically, the double-decker structures became costly overbuilt relics as they aged, requiring extensive maintenance. Public perception shifted, and the press began referring to locations like Chatham Square as “a tangle of girders”. The decline was fueled by the expansion of the cleaner, faster underground subway system. Removals began in 1938 with the 6th Avenue L, and sections of the double-decker arrangements, including the upper level of Queensboro Plaza, were dismantled during and after World War II. The postwar embrace of subways delivered the “real death blow,” leading to the closure of the last Manhattan sections by 1955. The final operational double-decker style junction, located in the Bronx at 149th Street, shut down in April 1973. Today, the era survives only in fragments; for example, the lower level of Queensboro Plaza remains active but includes an empty stub track that once led to the vanished upper level, while sealed-off approaches and structural reinforcements built to carry the L’s can still be spotted on the Queensboro Bridge.
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