York Street station (IND Sixth Avenue Line)

New York City Subway station in Brooklyn

The York Street station is a station on the IND Sixth Avenue Line of the New York City Subway. It is served by the F train at all times and the <F> train during rush hours in the peak direction. It is located at York Street and Jay Street in Dumbo and is the only Sixth Avenue Line station in Brooklyn.

More than 50 years before the construction of the IND Sixth Avenue Line, the intersection of York and Jay Streets was between two stations on the original BMT Lexington Avenue Line. West of the intersection was York and Washington Streets station, which had a connection to the Brooklyn Bridge via the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Railway. One block east of the station was the Bridge Street station. The line and the two stations ran west to east, were built by Brooklyn Elevated Railroad on May 13, 1885 and closed by Brooklyn Rapid Transit on April 11, 1904.

New York City mayor John Francis Hylan's original plans for the Independent Subway System (IND), proposed in 1922, included building over 100 mile (161 km) of new lines and taking over nearly 100 mile (161 km) of existing lines, which would compete with the IRT and the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT), the two major subway operators of the time. The IND Sixth Avenue Line was designed to replace the elevated IRT Sixth Avenue Line. The first portion of the line to be constructed was then known as the Houston–Essex Street Line, which ran under Houston, Essex, and Rutgers Streets. The contract for the line was awarded to Corson Construction in January 1929, and construction of this section officially started in May 1929. The York Street station opened on January 1, 1936, as the southern terminus of the first four stations to open on the Sixth Avenue Line. Two local tracks split from a junction with the Eighth Avenue Line south of West Fourth Street–Washington Square, running east under Houston Street and south under Essex Street to a temporary terminal at East Broadway. The station was initially served by E trains to Church Avenue. Just after midnight on April 9, 1936, trains began running under the East River via the Rutgers Street Tunnel, which connected the Houston Essex Street Line with the north end of the Culver Line at a junction with the Eighth Avenue Line north of Jay Street–Borough Hall. E trains were sent through the connection to Church Avenue.

The only exit, located at the station's north end, leads to the Rutgers Street tunnel ventilation tower at the intersection of York Street and Jay Street. It has a turnstile bank and long passageway and staircase to the platform.

There were proposals for a mezzanine at the station's south end, with an unbuilt entrance leading to the intersection of High Street and Jay Street. In 2016, Delson or Sherman Architects proposed a new accessible entrance at the south end of the York Street station. The MTA started conducting a feasibility study for a new entrance in 2021, following complaints from local residents and politicians who said the single entrance posed a safety hazard. The study found that both options for a new southern entrance would be prohibitively expensive because of the complex infrastructure around the site. A full stair and elevator entrance would cost $420–450 million, while an entrance containing only elevators would cost $230–260 million.