Bergen Street lower level

Bergen Street once had a lower level for peak-direction F trains. It closed when F rush hour service discontinued in 1976, even though rush hour service was restored on September 16, 2019.

Construction And operation
The Independent subway route from Jay St to Church Ave was one of the first opened, in March 1933, six months after the main line on 8 Ave. Curiously, this branch has never had a commonly agreed name, but is sometimes called the Smith St line. Once it was extended to the former BMT Culver line in 1954, it was known for a time as the Coney Island line. At any rate, it was planned to be a main line to one or more branches in southern Brooklyn, so it was built with four tracks along the lines of the Queens Boulevard line, with the express tracks lined up to Manhattan and the local tracks lined up to the Brooklyn-Queens Crosstown line

Possibly because it went only to Church Ave for 21 years, a full express and local service was not operated. Instead the Manhattan trains (variously the A E D F at different times) ran local to the end at Church Ave, and the Crosstown GG ended, as it still does, at the awkward location of Smith-9 St, solely because the switches near 4 Ave provide the only place to reverse short of Church Ave.

Once the line went all the way to Coney Island, it would probably have been time to apply the Queens Boulevard model to avoid a long local run, but it was not done, whether because of light traffic or entrenched passenger and operating expectations, it is hard to say. D and then F trains continued the long drag and GG continued to turn short.

In the spirit of new routes following the Chrystie St BMT-IND link in 1967, the Transit Authority's second wave of reroutings in July 1968 included finally extension of the GG local to Church Ave and express F service to that point, in rush hours.

Bergen St lower level and the tracks through it were all built 35 years earlier, and the lower level had probably been used from time to time when track work closed one of the upper level tracks, but it had never had regular train service. Nonetheless the lower level was open on this occasional basis.

The express F service caused a lot of grumbling from riders in the segment left with only GG trains. If Bergen St had been on one level it might have been a little better, but with stairs to climb, the daily commute took its toll. The two levels had been necessitated both by the narrowness of Smith St and the junction occurring just north of the station. When the budget crunch of 1976 necessitated some service cuts, the combination of rider complaints and relatively light patronage led to the restoration of the older service pattern. The reaction of passengers from out on the Culver line to the slower service is less well known.

The upper level was totally renovated in 1991-1992. The original tile was covered, and the former open stairways to the lower level, which made it obvious there was more to the station, had solid doors put on, which makes it not obvious at all. Reportedly the work damaged the lower level rendering it unusable for passenger service. For one thing, all the tile was removed, for reasons unknown.

A fire in the nearby signal room in March 1999 took out control of the switches for the ramp north of Bergen St. For a time, F trains ran via the lower level, but because of the renovation damage they could not make a stop at Bergen St.

F Express trains were restored in September 16, 2019.

Passenger trains still sometimes run through the lower level during rush hours, without stopping. Sometimes when the main track is congested, a southbound F train will be routed that way, with an announcement made at Jay St that the next stop is 7 Ave. More predictably, if track work is planned with trains skipping stations between Jay St and Seventh Ave, either direction, trains will be running past the closed platforms.