I was on the 1 train today, riding from Whitehall (South Ferry) to SoHo. There were a bunch of high-acheiving high school nerds trading notes on AP courses and SAT prep. As the train pulled out of the Rector St. station, one of them misheard the conductor’s garbled “Next Stop!” announcement and gasped, “Wait, is that open now?”
Confusion, as every part of this conversation was initially misunderstood by each other:
Kid 2: “What, no. Chambers is open.”
Kid 1: “No, that other stop that’s always under construction.”
Kid 3: “I sincerely hope not. We’re late enough.”
Kid 4: “I hear that station’s gonna be closed for, like, three years.”
Kid 3: “That station has been closed for, like, 20 years. Like, after 20 years, does anyone even want to go to Cortlandt Street anymore?”
Cortlandt St. – for those of you not from around here – has been greyed out and listed as “TEMPORARILY CLOSED” on subway maps since October of 2001. It was obliterated when the Towers fell. There are now mostly-functional semi-adult human beings currently earning college level credits who have never known it as anything but an urban wreck, a permanent construction zone, a ghost train station.