Named after Junction Boulevard, whose name has no certain explanation.
The station opened in 1917 as Junction Avenue and was renamed Junction Boulevard in 1940. Writer Kevin Walsh once linked ‘Junction’ to trolley lines meeting here, but a Junction Avenue already appears on an 1873 map; he now guesses it refers to the three railroads the road crossed. The boulevard later came to be called the ‘Mason-Dixon Line’, dividing Jackson Heights from the black communities of East Elmhurst and Corona.