Elbow too low and too high

I am doing my 3rd bathroom renovation in our house and have run into a problem I haven't seen before with the closet flange. I recently tiled the floor and the finished floor is 1.5" above the 90 degree elbow of the waste line. My house was built with 3" ABS waste lines. The elbow is too close to the finished floor. No matter how short the riser pipe is, the elbow causes the closet flange to sit too high off the finished floor. Yet if I try to use a 4" street closet flange, it only covers about 1/2" of the elbow before resting on the finished floor. This doesn't seem good either. My tile is already down but I can access the lines from underneath (will have to remove a little sheet rock but would prefer that over removing floor). Is there a different type of elbow I should be using?

How about a picture, because I cannot figure out what you are describing. You say 3" lines, but then reference a 4" "street flange", which would only go into a 4" fitting's hub. If I am interpreting this correctly, according to what you might mean rather than what you stated, then you need a 3x4 spigot closet bend. A conventional "slip over/hub" closet flange would slide down the spigot until it sat on the floor, then you would cut the protruding part off level with the flange.

Sorry. Here is a picture from the finished floor. You are looking at the top of what I have been calling the "elbow", a 90 degree ABS section intended to connect the riser to the 3" waste lines in the house. Those waste pipes are 3" inner diameter, 3.5 outer.

That looks more like a broken flange. If you remove the rag from the pipe we would be able to see what you have.

John

Definitely not a broken flange. I had welded a riser pipe in place only to learn that the elbow was too close to the finished floor. I used an inside pipe cutter after the fact hoping I could salvage this by placing a closet flange over the 90. Now I'm guessing i need to rip it out and start over. Yet my dilemma is still what can I do to prevent this from happening again?

Since the picture is looking straight down, we have no perspective as to what is there or what you did. A "RamBit" would remove that stub of pipe from the hub, and then a spigot flange would slide into it, after being cut to the proper length. Assuming you did not cut the hub of the elbow off with the internal cutter. There are a few ways to keep it from happening again, if you have to start over, but we cannot tell you which would work for you, because we do not know the dimensions of the space you are working in.