Although on the BMT Brighton Line, Seventh Avenue was built almost fifty years after the main segment of the line from Prospect Park to Brighton Beach opened in 1878. Prior to its opening, trains on the line used what is now the Franklin Avenue Shuttle and a connection to the elevated BMT Fulton Street Line on their way to the line's terminus at Fulton Ferry in Brooklyn or Park Row in Manhattan. The station is a product of the Dual Contracts, a 1913 group of contracts that provided for the construction of BMT underground lines in Manhattan and Queens. The first of these was the BMT Broadway Line which ran from its northern terminus at Times Square–42nd Street to its southern end at Whitehall Street in 1918. The Montague Street Tunnel, which linked Whitehall Street to Prospect Park station and would be the location for Seventh Avenue, opened on August 1, 1920, and moved trains from the elevated Franklin Avenue Line to the new underground line. During the 1964–1965 fiscal year, the platforms at Seventh Avenue, along with those at six other stations on the Brighton Line, were lengthened to to accommodate a ten-car train of -long IND cars, or a nine-car train of -long BMT cars.
Station layout
The Seventh Avenue station has two tracks and two side platforms. Each platform has two closed staircases that lead to a closed portion of the mezzanine above the platforms. Just north of the station, next to the southbound track, an opening in the tunnel allows a view of the southbound local track of the IRT Eastern Parkway Line. At this point in the complex Flatbush Avenue tunnel, the IRT local tracks are to the outside of the Brighton line tracks, while the IRT express tracks run at a lower level, below the station, with emergency exits furnished from same on both platforms at this station. This is one of two stations on the B train named "Seventh Avenue"; the other is Seventh Avenue–53rd Street on the IND Sixth Avenue Line in Manhattan.
Exits
This station has two entrances and exits. One stair goes up to the south sidewalk of Park Place east of Flatbush Avenue, while the other stair goes to the south sidewalk of Flatbush Avenue southeast of Park Place.
