PROBABLY the obscurest and shortest street that is traversed by a NYC elevated subway is Birchall Avenue, which runs from White Plains Road south beyond Sagamore Street to a dead end for the public, but an entranceway for employees of NYC Parks and Recreation. That’s a distance of one and a half blocks. Nevertheless, when the Bronx Park East station was built in 1917, it received the “monumental station” treatment with concrete and terra cotta cladding, which sits in a woebegone area of car repair shops and winter-potholed streets.
Birchall Avenue and Sagamore Street were built fairly early, as they show up on this 1901 map. The Birchall family, immigrants from England, arrived in 1818 and owned property on the Neal and Hunt estates; the latter also have streets named them, though Neal was respelled “Neill.”
More on the Bronx Park and Morris Park areas will be coming along later in the year.
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5/4/26