The station serves the adjacent Queens Center Mall, as well as numerous bus lines.

In the 1980s, the Woodhaven Boulevard station was renamed after Queens Center, an adjacent shopping mall.

The Queens Boulevard Line was one of the first built by the city-owned Independent Subway System (IND), and was planned to stretch between the IND Eighth Avenue Line in Manhattan and 178th Street and Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, with a stop at Woodhaven Boulevard.

[6] The line was constructed using the cut-and-cover tunneling method, and to allow pedestrians to cross, temporary bridges were built over the trenches.

[12] Construction was further delayed due to a strike in 1935, instigated by electricians opposing wages paid by the General Railway Signal Company.

[15] In August 1936, tracks were installed all the way to 178th Street, and the stations to Union Turnpike were completed.

[12] On December 31, 1936, the IND Queens Boulevard Line was extended by eight stops, and 3.5 miles (5.6 km), from its previous terminus at Roosevelt Avenue to Union Turnpike.

[21] The station was originally named "Woodhaven Blvd–Slattery Plaza", after Slattery Plaza, the area where four main Queens thoroughfares (Eliot Avenue and Horace Harding, Woodhaven, and Queens Boulevards) intersected.

[23] The plaza and subway station were named after Colonel John R. Slattery,[22] former New York City Board of Transportation chief engineer who died in 1932 while supervising the construction of the IND Eighth Avenue Line.

[22][23][25] Queens Center Mall first opened in 1973,[26] but the name convention on subway maps was not in use until the mid-to-late 1980s.

In June 1992, subway riders held a protest rally, demanding the reopening of the entrance.

[31] In November 2022, the MTA announced that it would award a $965 million contract for the installation of 21 elevators across eight stations,[32] including Woodhaven Boulevard.

[33][34]: 81  A joint venture of ASTM and Halmar International would construct the elevators under a public-private partnership.

It uses nine support beams in the station's mezzanine wrapped in different materials— including glass, iron, and stainless steel—to honor the soldiers who served in the 77th Infantry Division during World War I.

The outer walls of this trough are composed of columns, spaced approximately every 5 feet (1.5 m) with concrete infill between them.

[15] There is an entrance to the southeast corner of Woodhaven and Queens Boulevards that, as a result of the construction of the Long Island Expressway in the mid-1950s, leads only to a sidewalk isolated between two entrance ramps to the expressway, requiring passengers to cross traffic signals on all sides.