219th Street (IRT White Plains Road Line)

219th Street is a local station on the IRT White Plains Road Line of the New York City Subway. Located at the intersection of 219th Street and White Plains Road in the Bronx, it is served by the 2 train at all times and the 5 train during rush hours in peak direction.

This elevated station, opened on March 3, 1917 and renovated in mid 2006, has three tracks and two side platforms. The center track is not normally used in revenue service. There is a mechanical room below the northbound platform at its north end that is reachable by a closed-off staircase.

Both platforms have beige windscreens and red canopies with green outlines, frames, and support columns in the center and black, waist-high steel fences at either ends with lampposts at regular intervals. The windscreens have mesh fences at various points. The station signs are in the standard black name plates with white lettering.

This station has one elevated station house beneath the center of the platforms and tracks. Two staircases from each platform go down to a waiting area. The back of the token booth faces this crossunder with a steel fences on either side. On the Wakefield-bound side, there are two exit only turnstiles. On the Manhattan-bound side, there is an emergency gate and a bank of three turnstiles. Outside fare control, two staircases go down to the northwest and southeast corners of 219th Street and White Plains Road. The station house has glass windows.

The 2006 artwork here is called Homage by Joseph D'Alesandro. It consists of stained glass panels on the platform windscreens that depict colors showing certain human emotions and qualities.

There are crossovers and switches between this station and the next station south, Gun Hill Road.

Famous quotes containing the words street, white, plains and/or road:

    “Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on to the sidewalk.”
    —Robert Benchley (1889–1945)

    “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal.”
    —William Gibson (b. 1948)

    “When I say artist I don’t mean in the narrow sense of the word—but the man who is building things—creating molding the earth—whether it be the plains of the west—or the iron ore of Penn. It’s all a big game of construction—some with a brush—some with a shovel—some choose a pen.”
    —Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)

    “How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length
    How drifts are piled,
    Dooryard and road ungraded,
    Till even the comforting barn grows far away,
    And my heart owns a doubt
    Whether ‘tis in us to arise with day
    And save ourselves unaided.”
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)