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:

    “If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
    —Willa Cather (1876–1947)

    “Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
    The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
    For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
    Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.”
    —John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    “The Plains are not forgiving. Anything that is shallow—the easy optimism of a homesteader; the false hope that denies geography, climate, history; the tree whose roots don’t reach ground water—will dry up and blow away.”
    —Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)

    “Perhaps in His wisdom the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building.”
    —Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)