MTA to reopen long-shuttered entrances at bustling Brooklyn station

Velmanette Montgomery

Originally published in The New York Post

A dangerously overcrowded subway station in Brooklyn will get two more entrances later this year — right where the MTA closed them off a quarter-century ago.

Transit officials announced plans Thursday to reopen the long-shuttered Bedford Avenue and Fulton Street entrances to the Nostrand Avenue A and C train station in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where 36,000 daily riders currently enter and exit through just two staircases in either direction.

The reopening of the entrances — along with the cavernous passages that connect them to the station — will ease overcrowding and create a connection between northbound and southbound platforms, officials said.

The entrances are among hundreds across the subway system sealed off in the decades when New York City’s population was declining, only a handful of which have been reopened.

But a decade of population growth in Bedford-Stuyvesant and nearby Crown Heights has increased the Nostrand Avenue station’s daily ridership by 15% — creating potentially dangerous crowds during peak hours, local leaders say.

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