Riding The Train For 15 Cents, T.B. Ackerson’s Fight For Beverley And Cortelyou & More Of Our Subway’s History

We were excited to see that the Brooklyn Historical Society’s photo of the week is a shot of the Beverley subway station taken on New Year’s Eve in 1958 – a year when Brooklyn had not long ago lost the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Dwight Eisenhower was president and, as the BHS points out, a subway ride cost 15 cents.

The history of the Beverley station is a pretty interesting one, with the original station opening as a street-level station around 1900. The station house with below-grade platforms debuted seven years later, in 1907, after homeowners in neighborhoods like Caton Park, Prospect Park South, Beverley Square East and West, Ditmas Park, Ditmas Park West, Fisk Terrace, Midwood Park, and West Midwood protested a plan by Brooklyn Rapid Transit to run its Brighton line from Church Avenue to Sheepshead Bay on elevated tracks.

Because of backlash from the homeowners, BRT (which had consolidated our borough’s railroad and streetcar lines under its control in 1899) instead dug a trench wide enough for four tracks from Prospect Park to Avenue H.

And, if you ever wondered how it was that we got the Beverley and Cortelyou stops (the closest subway stops in the system), it apparently was because Thomas Benton Ackerson (aka T.B. Ackerson), the builder of Beverley Square East and West, used his political clout to make sure both these stations were built, as author Nedda C. Allbray pointed out in her book, “Flatbush: The Heart Of Brooklyn.”

The station was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.

The Brooklyn Historical Society’s Beverley photo comes from the former Long Island Historical Society (now the BHS) assistant librarian John D. Morrell, who donated his collection of more than 2,000 photos to the institution. The collection is a fabulous one, with his photographs focusing primarily on street scenes across the borough from the late 1950s to mid 1960s.

Here are a couple of Morrell’s photos from Cortelyou Road – pretty cool, right?

To check out Morrell’s entire collection, you can go to the BHS gallery here.

If you’re interested in seeing more historical photos of Brooklyn, you can also visit the Brooklyn Visual Heritage’s website.