Friendship Heights station

Location

Providing service for the Red Line, the station is at the 5400 block of Wisconsin Avenue, Northwest and serves the neighborhoods of Chevy Chase and Friendship Heights. The area is a major retail shopping and broadcast media district. The station also serves as a bus depot linking Montgomery County Transit's Ride-On bus system with the Washington Metro. It is directly adjacent to the Western Division Metrobus garage on 44th Street and Harrison Street NW.

Notable places nearby

History

The station opened on August 25, 1984. Its opening coincided with the completion of 6.8 miles (10.9 km) of rail northwest of the Van Ness–UDC station and the opening of the Bethesda, Grosvenor, Medical Center and Tenleytown stations. This station is relatively deep, since it is the fifth deepest station on the Red Line. The escalator ride from the common room at the north entrance to the mezzanine level takes roughly a minute and a half.

To enable Metro to perform train turnarounds south of Grosvenor-Strathmore, a diamond crossover exists just north of the station. Occasionally, during rush hours, trains terminate here for schedule adjustments. When trains occasionally terminate here during rush hours or other instances such as track maintenance, trains offload their passengers on the Shady Grove bound track, exit the station, switch direction just north of the interlocking, and then run through the interlocking to the Glenmont (downtown) track.

Station layout

This station uses the four-coffer arch design found at most underground stations on the western side of the Red line. Unlike its many counterparts such as Van Ness-UDC and Tenleytown-AU, the station's walls are rounder than most stations using the four-coffer arch design. This is also the only four-coffer arch designed station in the system that has a mezzanine at both ends of the platform.

Two of its five exits sit on the Maryland side of Western Avenue whereas the other three exit into the District. At the Western Avenue entrance, four separate street entrances come together in a common room, allowing riders to access a set of three escalators that go to the platform. One entrance is located at a side entrance to the lobby of an entrance to the C-level of Mazza Gallerie that has access to Western Avenue. Another entrance offers direct access to Chevy Chase Pavilion. The newest entrance, located off Wisconsin Avenue next to The Shops at Wisconsin Place opened in 2011 replacing an earlier entrance that led directly into a Hecht's. The new entrance is located across Wisconsin Avenue from the station's main entrance, which surfaces in a large bus depot underneath the Chevy Chase Metro Building. A second entrance, at the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and Jenifer Street NW, is elevator-only, with four elevators servicing the station's south mezzanine.