The MTA has finished restoring the 120-year-old headhouse at 149th Street–Grand Concourse, one of the Bronx's busiest and oldest transit hubs. Elevators — stripped out in the 1970s and absent for more than 50 years — are expected to open this summer, closing out a project that ran 32 months past its schedule.

The headhouse at the corner of East 149th Street and Grand Concourse is restored. The 120-year-old brick-and-mosaic structure — which opened in 1905 as the Mott Avenue station and had been left to deteriorate for decades — has been cleaned up and fitted with new elevators built inside its original shell. MTA spokesperson Michael Cortez confirmed the elevators are expected to open later this summer, completing a $123 million overhaul that the agency says will make the station fully accessible for the first time since the 1970s.

The station — served by the 2, 4, and 5 trains, with 2,087,669 riders in 2024 — lost its original elevators when the MTA stripped them out during the fiscal crisis era. Wheelchair users and anyone unable to climb the stairs have had no elevator access at this corner in Mott Haven and Melrose ever since.

Work started in 2021. By the time the headhouse was completed this month, the project was 32 months behind its original schedule. A consultant report published by the MTA in June placed the blame squarely on its contractor's "inability to effectively manage, plan, resource, coordinate, and recover the work." The MTA's statement to Gothamist said it was working "around the clock" to bring the project to completion.

The 149th Street–Grand Concourse station sits at the transfer point between the IRT Jerome Avenue Line and the IRT White Plains Road Line — one of the deepest-rooted transit intersections in the South Bronx, and one that has gone without a working elevator since before most of its current daily riders were born. The project is part of the MTA's compliance with a 2022 lawsuit settlement requiring 95 percent of subway stations to be accessible by 2055.

The headhouse is done. The elevators are still coming.