Once a glamorous hotel, building above Brooklyn Heights subway station continues to crumble

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The collapse of a marquee above an entrance to the Clark Street subway station in Brooklyn Heights on Sunday morning was just the latest chapter in the transit hub’s rough and rowdy history.

The station’s entrance is inside the lobby of the old Hotel St. George, which installed the now-doomed awning. The Department of Buildings said some of the steel beams supporting the structure had completely corroded. A second marquee above the station’s other entrance also showed signs of poor maintenance, prompting the MTA to close the station entirely for two days until engineers could shore up the structure and surround it with scaffolding. The entrance where the awning collapsed remains fenced off and closed to the public.

The historic late 19th century building now houses a student dormitory. But it was once the city’s largest hotel, and featured a near Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool, a ballroom and ritzy restaurants.

But after the hotel closed in the 1960s, its former lobby quickly became a hive of skullduggery, grabbing headlines over the following decades for shootings, a devastating fire and a strip club that attracted unscrupulous characters.

The now-shuttered ground-floor bar even served as the location where the character Luca Brasi was whacked in the 1972 film “The Godfather.”

By the 1980s, a notorious strip club named Wild Fyre opened in the same bar right next to the subway station’s entrance.

“Having gone to it once, what was interesting about it was it was in the old hotel bar,” said Barry Dinerstein, 69, who fondly recalled visiting Wild Fyre. “And I remember going in and commenting about how the bar was like a very substantial thing for, basically, a strip club. It was like a real fancy space that they had taken over.”

In 1989, an inebriated off-duty transit police detective held customers hostage at Wild Fyre — while still holding a drink — before shooting and critically wounding a patron.

“For 40 minutes, Detective Coyne terrorized the 15 patrons inside, moving through the bar and pointing his gun at them. Almost everyone managed eventually to flee the bar but the detective forced the bartender and the unidentified man sitting at the bar to stay,” the New York Times reported at the time.

A fire also broke out in the building in 1995. According to news reports, it took 500 of New York’s Bravest to extinguish the blaze.

Now, the lobby is filled with dingy retail spaces that are a far cry from the glitz and glam of the Hotel St. George’s heyday. The station’s entrance is also a subway oddity: There are no stairs or escalators directly beyond its turnstiles, only a set of elevators that take riders down to its mezzanine.

Despite those elevators, the Clark Street station isn’t compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act because a set of stairways are the only way to get from its mezzanine to its platforms. (An “On The Way” reporter carried a wheelchair down a set of stairs for an elderly couple while reporting this column.)

Riders don’t exactly love the elevators, complaints filed with the city buildings department show.

One rider griped that the elevator “closes too fast and hit my head.” Another reported it “smells of feces and stale water.”

The awning’s collapse only adds to the station’s lore. And many Brooklyn Heights locals, like Stanley Zareff, 82, were glad no one was hurt.

“ Oh, there was some shady aspects of it,” Zareff said of the station. “Brooklyn is a colorful place in more ways than one.”

NYC transportation news this week

Another Summer Street Saturday. Want to walk, rollerblade or ride a bike from the top to the bottom of Manhattan on car-free roads? You can.

“Summer Streets reimagines our public space as a shared resource.” - New York City Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez

This Saturday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and again on Saturday, Aug. 16, a route over the Brooklyn Bridge, up Lafayette Street and Park Avenue to 110th Street, across 110th to Broadway and up to Dyckman Street in Inwood will be closed to car traffic.

34th Street busway moves forward. Plans to install a busway across the major Midtown artery appear to be back on track after transit advocates grew concerned that Mayor Adams was working behind the scenes to scuttle the project.

Summer of hell, PATH edition. The Port Authority suspended service on the Journal Square-33rd Street and Hoboken-33rd Street lines for hours yesterday due to signal problems. (This came days after a fire broke out in a PATH train car in Jersey City, suspending service on several lines.)

Easier parking in Southeast Queens? JFK Airport said it’s adding a massive truck parking lot on its premises, which could eliminate what locals say is a scourge of 18-wheelers parking on nearby residential streets.

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Question from Jonathan in Westchester

While the Bee-Line bus is probably unknown to most New Yorkers, those who commute within Westchester as well as commute from NYC to and from Westchester depend on it. The Bee-Line bus system still relies on the MetroCard. As of this summer, there has been no public update from Westchester County on its progress in pivoting to OMNY, besides the lone public announcement in March 2025 in conjunction with the MTA officially retiring the MetroCard — saying that it would be ready by the end of the year. In the case of Westchester County missing the deadline — which it looks like it will — would the MTA extend the life of the MetroCard, or would Bee-Line riders have to start stocking up on quarters for the new year?

Answer

The MTA told Gothamist it’s on track and working closely with Westchester County to ensure OMNY will be installed and ready to go Bee-Line buses by the end of the year. But it offered no backup plan if the installation is delayed — and Westchester County officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Still, the Bee-Line is hardly the only non-MTA agency that relies on the MetroCard, which is slated to be retired by January.

There’s also the Nassau Inter-County Express bus service, which is also working to transition to OMNY Several other non-MTA services have already made the switch from the MetroCard to OMNY, including the Roosevelt Island Tramway and the AirTrain at JFK Airport.