VIDEO: Broadway Junction: First stages of progress for the overworked transit hub

November 29, 2017 By Liliana Bernal Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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The city announced on Monday the creation of the Broadway Junction Working Group and the start of a planning study to identify ways to bring new economic opportunities and services to the overworked Broadway Junction hub.

The hub, one of the busiest in Brooklyn, is an impressive labyrinthine structure where the Canarsie Line and Jamaica Line intersect above the underground Fulton Street Line.

Six subway lines, the A, C, J, Z, M and L, six bus routes and the Long Island Rail Road all converge at the station.

More than 100,000 passengers move in this transit center daily, most of them to transfer between train lines.

It could be said that this rich transit network offers vast commercial possibilities and services to those who pass nearby daily, as do other large stations in New York. However, the Broadway Junction is anything but a welcoming place.

The hub is located at the intersection of Broadway, Fulton Street and Van Sinderen Avenue, a desolate sector with little trade, wasteland, homelessness and parking lots.

It borders Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York, neighborhoods that have held high rates of poverty and crime for years.

The Broadway Junction Working Group is co-chaired by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Councilmember Rafael L. Espinal in partnership with the New York City Economics Development Corporation (NYCEDC), as well as a group of elected officials, community boards, and local stakeholders. The group has a mission “to develop a comprehensive vision and set of recommendations to guide future development in and around Broadway Junction,” according to a NYCEDC statement.

“Broadway junction is an area that has been overutilized and underinvested in for decades,” said Councilmember for the 37th District Espinal who affirms that the area offers great possibilities to improve socioeconomic conditions and increase the educational possibilities of Brooklyn.

For Adams, the transit hub has an unlimited potential for growth and prosperity, but it will take active community participation to shape that potential.

“It is time for us to tap into the power that tens of thousands of daily commuters represent for meaningful job creation and quality-of-life enhancements,” Adams said in the statement.

The planning group seeks to set the foundations of Broadway Junction transit hub and its surroundings to transform it into a commercial development center.

The transit hub was built in the late 1800s and had its last major renovation in the late 1990s.