Ghostly subway signage at Chambers Street

Time stands still at the Chambers Street J and Z station.

This deteriorated stop on the BMT, under the Manhattan Municipal Building, is like a subterranean ghost town. Its platforms are mostly empty, and paint peels while water drips from the ceiling.

But there’s one upside to the terrible neglect: No one has bothered to paint over the old-school IRT Lexington Avenue signs on several beams.

Most of the signs—1960s or 1970s maybe?—are much more faded than this one. They once pointed the way to the busier, tidier Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall 6 train station connected via a passageway.

Mystery mosaics at the Chambers Street station

The mosaics are so dark and grimy, you can barely see them from the platform.

But both the downtown and uptown tracks at the West Side Chambers Street station are lined with these images of a Federal-style building set amid tall trees.

Which poses a question: What building is it? Chambers Street doesn’t have anything like it today. A colonial-era city hall? A private mansion?

It’s actually one of the early incarnations of Columbia University. Founded in 1754 as King’s College, the school held classes around the corner from Chambers Street on Park Place.

Renamed Columbia in 1784, the college went uptown with the growing city. In 1857 it relocated to Madison Avenue and 49th Street—today’s Rockefeller Center—then picked up stakes for a final move to Morningside Heights in 1897.

Interestingly, turn of the century subway designers chose to commemorate the Ivy League school’s humble downtown beginnings.