Named after 74th Street and Broadway, a road pieced together from older ones.
The station opened in 1917 simply as Broadway. Queens’ Broadway is an amalgam of several roads and reached its present length only in the early 20th century; its southern part, between Woodside Avenue and Queens Boulevard, is the eastern section of the colonial-era Hellgate Ferry Road. Historian Vincent Seyfried held that it was joined up with Long Island City and Elmhurst only in 1933.