Sedgwick Ave

Sedgwick Ave was a train station on the former IRT Ninth Avenue Line. It opened in 1918 and closed in 1958, when the Polo Grounds Shuttle was discontinued.

Construction and operation
Numerous routes are called "elevated subways"; this is part of an "underground el".

As part of the Dual System planned in 1913, the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) company built an extension of the joint 6 Ave and 9 Ave els from 155 St and 8 Ave Manhattan, to join the City's Jerome Ave route. 155 St had long been a joint terminal of the Manhattan Railway's elevated lines and the predecessors of the New York Central's Putnam Division. The extension routed the el over the railroad's Putnam Bridge, and the railroad was cut back to a new terminal on the Bronx side called Sedgwick Ave, where there had not been a station before. From here the el was pointed directly at a spur of rock. The IRT blasted a tunnel for three blocks to the other side, and then continued the line by elevated to meet the City's Jerome Ave line at 162 St, which is over River Ave at that point.

The el extension was opened in July 1918. At first el trains provided the main service to the Jerome Ave line, but subway trains (called the 4 train years later) became the main service by the mid 1920's. Joint operation of subway and el trains lasted till 1940, when the City took over the IRT routes and eliminated several els including the 9 Ave El.

The closing of the 9 Ave El was not however the end of service through the tunnel. A remnant of the 9 Ave El continued to run, a shuttle from 155 St to 167 St. Sedgwick Ave was the only transit connection to the New York Central's Putnam Division terminal, and 155 St was busy when there were baseball and football games at the Polo Grounds at 155 St. The shuttle hung on until 1958, when the Putnam Division closed and the baseball Giants had already moved out west.

When the shuttle was closed, the steel elevated structure was removed, along with Putnam Bridge, but the ground level portions and tunnel remained.

Sedgwick Ave station was mostly at ground level with concrete platforms on each side of the two tracks. The west end was a wood platform on a steel structure passing over the New York Central's Hudson Division. The east end was in tunnel for about a car length. Thus it was just barely an underground station. The remaining part today are the platforms at ground level and into the tunnel.