New York is physically two cities. One is at street level, a grid of mostly brick and steel. The other is underground, a subterranean world of tunnels and tubes—not all of which can be accessed.

One of these unaccessible underground spaces is the unfinished Depression-era subway station in the vicinity of South Fourth Street in Williamsburg.

South Fourth Street is a ghost station; you could live in this stretch of Williamsburg near the elevated J, M, and Z tracks and never know it’s there. There’s no paved-over entrance, no sidewalk markings, and it doesn’t exist on any official map.

To call it an abandoned station is not exactly correct, as it never opened. “It’s never seen revenue service before, and in fact, it doesn’t even have a rail track running through it,” wrote Second Avenue Sagas in 2010. “It exists in fragments—poured concrete, unfinished stairwells, no lighting, no through tunnels—and is a remnant of an era of larger plans.”

Second Avenue Sagas and other sources pinpoint the South Fourth station as an extension of the Broadway IND station, which serves today’s G train. From the north end of the G stop platform, you can supposedly see glimpses of the unfinished stairways no passenger ever traversed, according to Joseph Brennan on his Abandoned Stations web page.

The idea that a phantom subway station lies beneath the heavily traveled streets of Williamsburg feels secretive and exciting. It’s like a portal to another New York, where city planners dreamed big while passengers paid just a nickel per ride.

But why the station was created and subsequently deserted echoes the fate of so many New York City infrastructure projects. They tend to be clashes between ambitious ideas of connection and growth that fall apart when faced with the cold reality of a lack of funds.

South Fourth Street’s story began in 1929, when New York’s population of five million was on the upswing and more expansive mass transit needs were anticipated.

Building on an announcement five years earlier that new subway routes would be built, transit officials came up with what was dubbed a “Second System” that extended some subway routes from Lower Manhattan into Brooklyn. (Map above, of IND Second Station plans, has South Fourth Street at the nexus of planned Houston Street and Lower Manhattan lines.)

The timing of the Second System couldn’t have been worse. With the arrival of the Depression, public financing dried up, wrote Brennan. Eventually federal funds came through, and construction commenced on some of the proposed Second System stations, including South Fourth Street.

The idea for the station sounded auspicious. It would have six tracks and serve as a transfer station, relieving the crowds at existing transfer stations between the boroughs and making travel between Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens easier.

Expecting the new station to open soon, workers installed support columns, created platforms, and put in track beds. But work paused at the onset of World War II…and never restarted.

As far as I can tell, no neighborhood organizations demanded that the station open. I couldn’t find any record chronicling a fight to save the station and the rest of the shelved Second System plans.

It almost seems like the whole project died with a whimper, and as time went on, the South Fourth Station was forgotten—except by subway junkies, graffiti artists, and intrepid urban explorers.

Until 2010, that is. That year, two artists who go by Workhorse and PAC launched an art show dubbed the Underbelly Project featuring the work of 103 street artists, “mostly big murals,” wrote Jasper Rees in the New York Times. Rees was given a tour of the station-turned-gallery. (Mural from the Underbelly Project, above)

“The place was pitch black, but standing with a powerful flashlight on a platform, PAC said, he had been able to make out a landscape of several more platforms, each lined with rows of columns, alternating with sunken track beds,” wrote Rees, adding that this shell of a station was “about the size of a football field.”

Not long after the Underbelly Project launched, the NYPD arrested 20 people who attempted to get into the station-gallery, per a November 11 New York Times article. Almost all were charged with trespassing.

Fifteen years later, the fate of this subterranean art show is unclear, and probably only very daring urban explorers have reached the unfinished station since the the show, as it’s reportedly sealed off by the MTA.

Thanks to an undated video shot by the Underbelly Project, you can see this abandoned space and the art that greeted the few New Yorkers able to see it. It’s a mysterious place of connection not by subway tracks but through art and imagination.

[Top and second photos: Hopetunnel.org; third image: 1929 Board of Transportation IND Expansion map; fifth image: Street art by Graffiti Master KNOW-HOPE (Addam Yekutieli) by Stuart McAlpine via Wikipedia; sixth photo: Hopetunnel.org]

Tags: Abandoned Subway Station Williamsburg, ghost subway stations NYC, NYC Subway Expansion Plans Never Done, NYC Subways 1920s, Old Subway Maps NYC, South Fourth Street Abandoned Subway Station, Williamsburg Secret Subway Station

This entry was posted on November 10, 2025 at 1:29 am and is filed under art, Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Maps, Transit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.