New York's L train in sixteen photographs, from Chelsea to Canarsie

The L runs between Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, Manhattan, and Rockaway Parkway in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and it runs 24 hours a day. It has 24 stations. The part in Brooklyn is older than the part in Manhattan: train service began there in 1906, between Canarsie and Williamsburg. A subway under 14th Street opened in 1924, ran under the East River and reached Montrose and Bushwick Avenues, and four years later it was extended to Broadway Junction.

The L was the first New York City Subway service to be automated using communications-based train control, which began on February 24, 2009. More recently, its tunnel under the East River was repaired after damage from Hurricane Sandy. The full shutdown that had been planned was dropped, work began in April 2019 with reduced service on nights and weekends, and it was finished by April 27, 2020, three months ahead of schedule.

Measured in straight lines between the stations, the line is about 16 kilometres long. The longest gap is 1st Avenue to Bedford Avenue, about 2.5 kilometres, which is the crossing under the East River. The shortest is Broadway Junction to Atlantic Avenue, about 400 metres. Only four stations are shared with other lines, but 14th Street-Union Square has eight lines in all and Broadway Junction has five. In HelloSubway the L takes 389 keystrokes to type, level 4, and it is one of the three lightest lines in New York. Here is the ride from west to east, with a photograph for sixteen of the stops.

The cover photograph is Bedford Avenue, the main strip of Williamsburg, lined with cafes, boutiques and galleries.

Manhattan: the High Line to 1st Avenue

The High Line, near 8th Avenue, is an elevated park built on a former freight rail line in Chelsea. At Union Square, the Strand opened in 1927, is now anchored at Broadway and East 12th Street, two blocks from the square, and advertises 18 miles of books. It is one of the last survivors of the secondhand-book district once nicknamed Book Row.

At 3rd Avenue, Tompkins Square Park is a 10.5-acre park in the heart of the East Village, historically a centre of counterculture and community activism. At 1st Avenue, Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village is a vast post-war residential complex of 110 brick apartment buildings set among tree-lined pedestrian paths along the East River edge of Manhattan.

Williamsburg and Bushwick

After the tunnel, Bedford Avenue is the first stop in Brooklyn. Brooklyn Brewery was founded in 1988 and moved in 1996 into a converted matzo factory on North 11th Street, and it welcomes visitors for tours and tastings. At Lorimer Street-Metropolitan Avenue, McCarren Park is a 35-acre park straddling the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, with athletic fields and a historic Art Deco pool of 1936.

Domino Park, at Grand Street, is built on the former Domino Sugar Refinery site and has views of the Williamsburg Bridge and the Manhattan skyline. Montrose Avenue is the stop for Most Holy Trinity-St. Mary, a French Gothic Revival church completed in 1885 for the German American Catholic community, whose twin stone spires are still the tallest structures for blocks around.

At Morgan Avenue, the Moore Street Retail Market is an enclosed public market that opened in 1941 under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. It is nicknamed La Marqueta de Williamsburg for the Cuban, Puerto Rican and Dominican vendors who built its postwar reputation, and it is still trading. Jefferson Street is at the core of one of the city's most celebrated open-air street art districts, where large murals by local and international artists cover the building facades.

DeKalb Avenue has St. Barbara's Church, a Spanish Colonial Revival Catholic church built between 1907 and 1910 for Bushwick's German congregation. It was funded in part by the brewer Leonard Eppig and named partly for his daughter Barbara.

The Queens border and the east

At Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenues the line meets the M train, in one of the few cross-platform transfer stations in the subway. On the Brooklyn-Queens border, the Cornelia-Putnam Historic District is a row of Renaissance Revival brick and brownstone houses built in Ridgewood in the 1890s. One stop on, at Halsey Street, the Forest-Norman Historic District is a stretch of ornate Queen Anne rowhouses with rounded bay windows. Both were added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 30, 1983.

Bushwick Avenue-Aberdeen Street is the stop for the Cemetery of the Evergreens, established in 1849 just south of the station. It covers 225 acres, holds more than half a million burials and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. At Atlantic Avenue, Highland Park is a 141-acre park established in 1901 on the Brooklyn-Queens border around the Ridgewood Reservoir, which is no longer in use. It has a 1925 World War I monument by the sculptor Pietro Montana.

The line ends at Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway, and Canarsie Pier extends into Jamaica Bay at the western edge of the Gateway National Recreation Area. It is a reminder that Canarsie was once a major waterfront resort and fishing community. In East Flatbush, the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House was built around 1652 on land purchased from the Lenape. It is recognised as the oldest surviving structure in New York City, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1967 and now operates as a museum.

Type it yourself

The L train is a good first New York line. The longest names are Lorimer Street-Metropolitan Avenue at 34 letters, Bushwick Avenue-Aberdeen Street at 31 and Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway at 25, so the hyphens count too. The four numbered Manhattan stops, 8th, 6th, 3rd and 1st Avenue, are the shortest at 10 letters. The ranking of all lines shows where the L sits, the longest names in the game explains why New York names are so long, and the 7 train ride covers the line from Flushing to Hudson Yards.