Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials marked on Tuesday the completion of new elevators and other upgrades to the Church Avenue station on the B and Q lines in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
MTA CEO and Chair Janno Lieber, Construction President Jamie Torres-Springer, and Chief Accessibility Officer Quemuel Arroyo cut the ribbon on the station improvements during a Nov. 25 news conference.
The project added two new elevators — one each to the Brooklyn and Manhattan-bound platforms — bringing the station into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The other upgrades include two new staircases and an additional entrance on East 18th Street between Church and Caton Avenues.
“IT’s Thanksgiving, and we are thankful for another completed station renovation here at church Avenue,” said Lieber, who lives close by to the station. “This is a busy station, folks. I’m going through it every day. The new ADA elevators are always the headline when we do these projects, but we did a ton of other work to upgrade the station.”
Arroyo, who himself uses a wheelchair, said making the accessibility upgrades is about giving those with disabilities the freedom to get out of their houses every morning, “so I can go to work, go to school, go to my doctor’s appointment, but also to enjoy all that New York has to offer.”
“With these accessibility initiatives, we are telling all New Yorkers that they belong, New Yorkers with access needs that they belong, tourists with access means that they belong,” he continued.
The push for greater subway accessibility
Lieber said his team has greatly increased the speed at which the MTA is making ADA station upgrades. He said there are currently 30 stations under construction and another 60 that are funded as part the agency’s 2025-29 Capital Plan.
“Every New Yorker deserves to be able to use our amazing subway system,” Lieber said. “It’s the lifeline, access to jobs, to education, to medical care, to everything New York has to offer. And we are changing the map so that the map for people with disabilities, for seniors, for parents with strollers, for everybody, is the same as the map that you see on the subway car wall.”
However, the MTA chair noted that there is still a long way to go to make every one of the subway’s 472 stations accessible, while noting that some will not be He said the agency has made about one-third of the stations accessible thus far, but will have made those that serve roughly 75% of their ridership accessible by the end of the current capital program.
Torres-Springer called the Church Avenue renovation a “remarkable feat of construction,” due to its involvement in adding a new mezzanine in the center of the station above moving subway cars. Church Avenue, which serves an average of 10,000 daily customers, is in an open-air trench. similar to other stations on the same stretch of the Q and B Lines.
The new elevators and staircases open onto the mezzanine, which features windows looking out onto the express tracks below.
“We built this new structure on top of the trains as they ran through, and this bridge across it to create this accessible path to both elevators on the street,” Torres-Springer said.
Among the other station improvements, Torres-Springer named new turnstiles, tactile yellow platform edge strips, and raised boarding areas for wheelchair users.
