An abandoned New York City subway station will briefly return to public life when mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds his private swearing-in ceremony beneath its tiled arches on January 1.
The Old City Hall station, built underneath City Hall during the Gilded Age, was one of New York City’s original 28 subway stations before it closed in 1945.
In a statement, Mamdani called the Old City Hall subway station “a physical monument to a city that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working peoples’ lives.”
The small ceremony will be followed by a public inauguration held above ground outside City Hall.
Take a look inside the Old City Hall subway station.
The Old City Hall subway station was built beneath New York City’s City Hall in 1904 and remained in operation until 1945.
Completed in 1812, New York City’s City Hall is one of the oldest, continuously used City Hall buildings in the US.
Today, it’s only accessible through guided tours offered by the New York Transit Museum.
The tours are only open to New York Transit Museum members. Individual memberships start at $65 per year, and tickets to the Old City Hall tours cost $50.
On tours of the station, guides use a ramp to bridge the wide gap between the train doors and the subway platform.
The 6 train still passes by the Old City Hall platform after making its last stop at the modern Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall station, which is how New York Transit Museum tours access the site.
One of the reasons that the Old City Hall station closed was due to the large gap between the train and the platform. As subway trains added more cars and became longer, the station’s curved platform no longer sat flush to the doors, leaving a dangerously large opening over the live tracks.
Former Business Insider reporter Graham Rapier visited the Old City Hall station in 2019 and observed how tour guides helped visitors disembark safely using a ramp with handrails.
The subway platform features skylights and vaulted tile archways designed by Spanish engineer Rafael Guastavino.
Guastavino’s trademark vaulted arches also adorn Grand Central Terminal, the Queensboro Bridge, Ellis Island, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, among other New York City landmarks.
Guastavino tile also appears in the original ticket hall.
Here, straphangers once paid $0.05 per ride. In 2026, the cost of a subway trip will rise from $2.90 to $3.
The Old City Hall station features just one staircase leading to and from the subway platform.
The door at the top of the stairs is kept padlocked shut.
The original City Hall signage still remains, a testament to its place in history as one of New York City’s original 28 subway stations.
The station will make history again on January 1 when Mamdani is sworn in as New York City’s first Muslim mayor and, at 34 years old, the youngest mayor since 1892.
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