Opened in 1913 beneath the Manhattan Municipal Building, the imposing public edifice that the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White raised next to City Hall, the Chambers Street station was conceived to be a great subway terminal in lower Manhattan, at a time when underground transit was a matter of civic pride. Its vaulted architecture, faced with pale tiles that follow one another in arches, still holds the monumental ambition of that first moment, with an almost ecclesiastical solemnity.