A subway station that hasn’t seen a paying rider since 1946 is about to host an underground disco party. The New York Transit Museum turns its decommissioned Court Street Station at 99 Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn into a two-level dance party called Vinyl Nights Presents Return to ’76, celebrating the museum’s 50th anniversary with music from the Vinyl Nights event.
The party’s timing is no accident. As reported by Time Out, the museum first opened its doors on July 4, 1976, and that origin story runs deeper than most visitors realize. According to the New York Transit Museum, the institution began as a temporary two-month exhibition organized by transit employees for the U.S. Bicentennial, staged inside Court Street Station itself — and it proved so popular that transit officials decided to keep it running permanently.
Court Street Station has its own strange history baked into the walls. The stop opened on April 9, 1936, as the terminus for the IND Fulton Street Line’s HH Shuttle, a short run connecting Court Street and Hoyt-Schermerhorn over just three blocks, per the museum. Low ridership shut the station to passengers in 1946, and the disused station later spent decades hosting worker training and film shoots…