page_title: Green Street station
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Green Street station / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Early divided back postcard of Jamaica Plain station
context_page_description: Green Street is a rapid transit station in Boston, Massachusetts. It serves the MBTA's Orange Line and is located in the southern part of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Green Street is the least-used station on the Orange Line, averaging 3,055 weekday boardings in FY 2019. Like all Orange Line stations, it is fully accessible.
context_section_description: In 1841, the Boston and Providence Railroad (built starting in 1832) began offering service to Jamaica Plain station, located on the site of today's Green Street station; commuter rail service to the station would continue, uninterrupted, for nearly a century.  Originally, the station was at ground level, but, starting in 1891, the Old Colony Railroad (which had acquired the B&P in 1888, and was itself acquired in 1893 by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad) raised the section of its main line through Jamaica Plain (extending from Massachusetts Avenue to the current location of Forest Hills station) onto a 4-track stone embankment to eliminate dangerous grade crossings.  The project involved the building of five new stations in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain; the existing stations at Roxbury Crossing, Jamaica Plain, and Forest Hills were replaced with new elevated stations, while new stations were built at Heath Street and Boylston Street.  The brand-new Jamaica Plain station opened on June 1, 1897, along with the other four new stations.
  On 22 November 1909, the Washington Street Elevated was extended south along Washington Street from its original southern terminus at Dudley Square, with new stations at Egleston and Forest Hills. Both Egleston and Forest Hills allowed direct connections to the Elevated from streetcar routes serving Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain (as well as, in the case of Forest Hills, to NYNH&H commuter trains); however, El ridership from the areas immediately surrounding the extension also proved high, and an infill station at Green Street (three blocks to the east of the NYNH&H station) opened on 22 September 1912.
  Although the five NYNH&H stations in Jamaica Plain continued to operate for over three decades following the southward extension of the Washington Street Elevated, they were ultimately unable to compete with the Elevated, and all, including Jamaica Plain station, were closed on 29 September 1940 due to a lack of passengers.
  In the 1960s, plans took hold to extend I-95 into downtown Boston along the NYNH&H's right-of-way and to replace the Washington Street Elevated (from 1967 known as the Orange Line) with a rapid transit line running in the new highway's median; these plans led to the demolition of hundreds of homes and the clearing of a long strip of land (the Southwest Corridor) extending through Roxbury and Jamaica Plain all the way up to Green Street, before the project was halted by highway revolts in 1969 and the 11 February 1970 announcement by Governor Francis W. Sargent of a moratorium on new highway construction within the Route 128 corridor, and eventually cancelled by Governor Sargent in 1972.  The cleared strip of land was eventually developed into the Southwest Corridor Park, and the Orange Line was moved to a new alignment along the Corridor in 1987 despite the cancellation of the project originally calling for its relocation.  This included a new rapid transit station at Green Street, on the site of the former NYNH&H station; the old Green Street station, along with the rest of the Washington Street Elevated, was permanently closed on 30 April 1987, and the new station opened on 4 May, as did the eight other new stations on the southern Orange Line.
caption: Jamaica Plain station around 1910
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