MTA – 8th St-NYU Subway Station

By 7 broadway they meant «&»…take the R to & from here sometimes, and the terrible entry means just one narrow turnstile to enter and idiots blocking it. A great station to exit, but terrible one to enter. Tiny platforms and blasts of cold air even when you’re just on a train passing thru with the doors open.

Tiny is one of the best words to describe this station. It’s also not the cleanest or nicest in the system but I haven’t had problems with creepy folk bothering me. A local stop but if you want to give someone an accurate picture of the NYC subway system, this is one subway station to take that person to.

I saw a cockroach the size of a fist in the midst of wildly flailing it’s tentacles whilst exiting the station.
And if that’s not bad enough… while entering this station, I nearly stepped in a pile of human fecal matter.
Watch out in here.

The 8^th street station is particularly neat because for several years the walls were covered with these plain blue tiles and most of the stations on the Broadway line in Manhattan and Brooklyn were labeled with this Helvetica lettering; at one point, this may have been the design program the MTA planned to convert the whole system to. There are a few stations on the Broadway line that still have this motif; in this and other stations such as 23^rd and Cortlandt streets, the blue tiles have been stripped away and the old mosaics given new life. I think the Rector Street station may be the last one in Manhattan that hasn’t had the old tiles uncovered yet. (A few stations in Brooklyn, such as Union Street, still sport the tiles and Helvetica lettering.)
Whoever thought it was a good idea to cover up these tile mosaics was probably thinking along the same lines as the person who decided it was time to demolish the old Penn Station. («It’ll be easier to maintain, and a more modern look!»)