The Grand Street station is an express station on the IND Sixth Avenue Line of the New York City Subway. Located at the intersection of Grand Street and Chrystie Street in the Lower East Side and Chinatown neighborhoods of Manhattan, it is served by the D train at all times and the B train on weekdays. Opened on November 26, 1967, this station was one of two added as part of the Chrystie Street Connection. The station has two tracks and two narrow side platforms, located approximately below ground. In the original plan for the station, this would have been a four-track, two-island platform station, with a transfer to the Second Avenue Subway. The fourth phase of the Second Avenue Subway, if built, would include new platform(s) connecting to the existing platforms. History Construction The station was built as part of the Chrystie Street Connection between the Sixth Avenue Line and the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. The Chrystie Street Connection was first proposed in 1947 as the southern end of the Second Avenue Subway (SAS), which would feed into the two bridges, allowing Sixth Avenue Line trains to access the BMT Jamaica Line, BMT Fourth Avenue Line and the BMT Brighton Line in Brooklyn. In mid-1957, the New York City government solicited bids from contractors to construct the various parts of the connection. One of the contracts was for the construction of a station at Grand and Chrystie Streets, serving trains to and from the Manhattan Bridge. Because there was a large number of senior citizens living near that intersection, the station was originally planned to contain many ramps and "a minimum of steps". A groundbreaking ceremony for the connection took place on November 25, 1957. The connection was projected to cost $100 million and provide capacity for 52,000 more riders an hour between Brooklyn and Manhattan. In 1960, New York City Transit allocated $23 million for the installation of new signals in the Chrystie Street tunnels and six other locations in the subway system. Construction of the station started in 1962, and the entire seven-block length of Chrystie Street was closed until 1964. By March 1964, the new connection was expected to be completed within the next year. Later that year, the tracks in the new connection were laid. In contrast to subway tracks on existing lines, which contained wooden cross ties, the new tracks were installed on rubber