“If you were standing here in 1919, you’d be taking a streetcar to Andrew or to Bayview’’ in South Boston, Clarke said at the old Broadway station.
The station is sandwiched midway between the street-level entrances to the modern Broadway Station above and the platform below, accessible through a silver door marked “T personnel only.’’ Beyond the old mosaic “Broadway’’ sign at the platform, a track bed and tunnel extend about a quarter-mile to a street-level fence that faces Foundry Street, across from an MBTA rail yard.
Though used only between 1917 and 1919, the abandoned station became something of a test kitchen for the subway system. In the 1930s, Boston Elevated Railway Co. even tried growing mushrooms there, Clarke says. In the 1980s, the T brought blind passengers in to test rubber warning strips now used on platform edges. And after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, firefighters simulated a burning train emergency in the tunnel, says Michael Mulhern, a retired MBTA general manager.