The Lenox Terminal/148th Street Station is among Manhattan’s most unusual subway stations. It’s a true terminal, as it’s the northern end of the #3 line.
–It’s the only Manhattan station that sees daylight, except for a few stations on the #1 that are close to the surface and have sunlight seeping through grates; or on elevated stations such as 125th or all stations north of 191st
–It’s the only Manhattan subway station that is completely at grade, or the same height as the street (a portion of Dyckman Street station that exits a tunnel also is)
–It does not end at Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard); it ends at Powell Boulevard and 149th Street at the Esplanade Gardens Houses. The terminal is so named because the #3 runs beneath Lenox Avenue from 110th Street north to 145th, where it begins a climb to the surface and takes a turn to the west.
–It is tied for one of the newest Manhattan stations with the Grand Street IND station (1967) and 57th Street/6th Avenue (1968). The Hudson Yards station serving the #7, however, opened in 2015 and three stations serving the new Second Avenue line are still scheduled to open in December 2016.
The trackage has been in place since the earliest days of the subway in 1904 as terminal yards, but in 1957 a proposal was put forth by area residents to build a station at the west end of the yards to accommodate a “transit hole” in the area as the 145th Street station serving the IND was too far west.
The south end of the #3 line is New Lots Avenue in East New York, but there is an elevated connection to trainyards that run over Linden Boulevard and Cleveland Street, which would be a couple of blocks from the shopping malls at Spring Creek. Any passenger service extensions there are probably a few years away, at least.
11/26/16