Underground Art: A Blog and Book on the Art of the New York City Subway

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The front page of the proof-of-concept book proposal for 472 Stations: The People’s Gudie to the New York City Subway.

Page one of the proof-of-concept for 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway.

The Columbus Circle subway stop, featuring work by both architects Heins + LaFarge and Squire Vickers.

The Chambers Street A, C Line.

Art at the 14th Street subway station near the PATH station.

Art commissioned for the Pelham Parkway by the MTA Arts & Design program.

Bleecker and Astor Street Stations

The Bleecker Street ceramic medallion, helping straphangers find the stop for nearly 120 years.

Still on the ORIGINAL 28, these Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) stops showcase Heins & LaFarge at their prime

George L. Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge — the original architects of New York’s subway system — met as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology around 1880 and then worked in the architectural office of Cass Gilbert. In 1886, they set up their own New York practice. In the spring of 1900, Heins & LaFarge, after finishing some impressive commissions, met the financier August Belmont, the head of the consortium that was building New York's first underground mass transit system. In March 1901, Belmont helped get them appointed as architects for the first subway line, to run from City Hall to Grand Central, across to Times Square, and up Broadway to West 145th Street.

Bleecker Street: For the station at Bleecker and Lafayette Streets, Heins & LaFarge, designed two styles of station identifiers made by the Grueby Faience Company in 1904. The large broad oval medallion, glazed faience “Bleecker Street” plaques in cobalt blue with white letters depicting poppies were assembled from 27 pieces of faience ceramic. The smaller blue “B” cartouches show tulips, serving as a reminder of the Dutch origins of the city. Later Squire Vickers’ installed five different colored mosaics, which were sadly removed in the station’s 2012 renovation.

A collage of all the elements of the Astor Place station.

Astor Place: The next stop, Astor Place, is an homage to John Jacob Astor. Astor made his millions in the 19th-century fur trade, reflected in the beaver Grueby Faiences designed by Heins & LaFarge, which laid at the underground stop near his home in New York’s Greenwich Village. Ironically, Astor quite possibly never saw them, as the wealthy in the Gilded Age usually traveled by carriage. In 1986, graphic designer Milton Glaser, of  I ♥ New York fame, created Untitled, which he described as “a variation on the existing forms. By extracting fragments of the motifs on the tile panels, enlarging their scale, and placing these pieces in a random pattern, they take on the appearance of a puzzle.”

A detail of the Grueby Faience offset by a modern Metro card machine, which will soon be made obsolete by the subway’s OMNI card system.

One of the panels designed by Milton Glaser to riff off the original terra-cotta emblems of Heins & LaFarge. Notice the various squares in the top right and left corners framing the beaver.

Another Glaser panel. Glaser, who died in 2020 at age 91, would sometimes venture into Astor Street to see how the ceramic panel was holding up. Easily scratched and defaced, the MTA Arts & Design program, which funds the transit art, rarely uses the medium, insisting on mosaic.

Canal Street

A collage of the various signage at Canal Street. Top left, a Squire Vickers’ “C”; next to it, a Heins & LaFarge cartouche offset by a Vickers mosaic. Below new mosaics done by Bing Lee read "Canal Street" in English or the Chinese characters for “Chinatown.” Middle left, a Heins & LaFarge terra cotta image of the spire of St. John’s Chapel told illiterate subway riders where they had landed.

Moving up the ORIGINAL 28 stations, CANAL has a stop on all lines.

Next stop on the Underground Art train: Canal Street. Canal has so many tunnels and stations, it’s easy to get lost, yet the labyrinth features art from original Heins & LaFarge Beaux Arts cartouches to the tiles of Bing Lee's Empress Voyage (1998).

After winning the competition for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine at Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street, Christopher Heins and Grant LaFarge (Heins & LaFarge) who met at MIT became the super-star architects of the early 20th century. In the spring of 1900, Heins & LaFarge met the financier August Belmont, head of the consortium that was building New York's first underground mass transit system. They worked with designers and producers of ceramics, such as the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company at Canal Street, to make the subway both functional and beautiful. After Heins died in 1907, for both aesthetic and budgetary reasons, Squire Vickers — the subway’s longest-serving architect — pushed the subway onto a much more pared-down, modern path. Much of Vickers’s straightening and flattening had to do with the prevailing aesthetics of his day, as Arts and Crafts restraint gave way to just-the-facts decoration, sans-serif type and solid colors of the Independent subway in the 1930s.

Interlocking teapots incorporate the Chinese symbol for “good life.”

Lee’s Empress Voyage commemorates the pioneering expedition of the American merchant ship Empress of China, which in 1794 returned to New York Harbor filled with silk, tea, and porcelain. On the platforms, interlocking teapots incorporate the Chinese symbol for “good life.” Other symbols, on the station's upper level, are variations on the symbols for “Asia,” “quality,” and “cycle.” As trains arrive, debarking passengers are given a choice of reading “Canal Street” in English or the Chinese characters for “Chinatown.” Lee was born in China and grew up in Hong Kong, and initiated an ongoing visual vocabulary project called “Pictodiary” in 1983. Since then, he has worked on a daily iconographic journal.

Teapots across the platform are the same teapots in jade and black.

Tiles on Bing Lee’s work Empress Voyage use Chinese-derived icons, illustrating aspects of the then-new trade with Asia and today's Chinatown.

A Heins & LaFarge cartouche offset by a Vickers’ mosaic.

As trains arrive, debarking passengers are given a choice of reading “Canal Street” in English or the Chinese characters for “Chinatown,” thanks to the artist Bing Lee.

The Brooklyn Bridge

The next stop on the New York subway in the Original 28 stations is Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall. Blink and you’ve likely missed the old City Hall station, although the 6 train does slow down as it passes through.

One of the ORIGINAL 28, the Brooklyn Bridge Station lives on through renovation

Closed in 1945 after just over 40 years, City Hall had Gustavino vaulted ceilings and skylights, but it was one of the least-used in the system. The nearby Brooklyn Bridge stop was frequented by the express train and closer to connecting streetcars. Boston-based Grueby Faience Company received the commission to create elaborate plaques of faience, a double-fired terracotta with a jewel-like, lustrous glaze. Grueby would decorate a host of stations, but Brooklyn Bridge would be special. Much like the Union Square and 33rd Street stations, Brooklyn Bridge would boast bald eagles high on its walls, clutching plaques in their talons. But unlike any other station, these eagles displayed the initials “BB,” the first “B” reversed to create a monogram.

Today’s subway is a sprawling labyrinth of 472 stations along 665 miles of track. But back in 1904, it was just a single line starting at City Hall (the fabled station of Guastavino-tiled vaults abandoned since 1945) and finishing at 145th Street uptown. London, Budapest, Paris, Berlin, Boston — all had opened subways years before. To be of any consequence, then, New York’s system would need to set a new standard.

Christopher Heins & Grany LaFarge, the subway’s chief architects, dressed the stations of the Brooklyn Bridge in neoclassical finery —roman brick wainscoting, marble coping, cornices and mosaic name panels. But the flashiest jewelry the stations would wear took the form of oversized plaques of glazed terracotta. Roman brick wainscoting, marble coping, cornices and mosaic name panels for the Brooklyn Bridge station.

Perched on the walls of a pair of abandoned subway platforms at the Brooklyn Bridge station on the 4, 5 and 6, these rare birds have been sealed off from public view—entombed, literally, behind brick walls—for six decades. Until just after the recent renovation.

Thanks to the foresight of William Barclay Parsons, the chief engineer, the subway would be — above all — elegant. Having toured Europe’s subways, Parsons was dismayed to find them lacking in aesthetic appeal. “No attempt was made to give them a pleasing appearance,” he complained in 1894. And so, by the time the architectural firm of Heins & LaFarge got to work on the station interiors, the City Beautiful Movement was starting. Neoclassical décor was needed for the people who were going to use the subways. This way, they were exposed to something artistic.” Heins & LaFarge dressed the stations of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company in neoclassical finery—roman brick wainscoting, marble coping, cornices and mosaic name panels.

The results of a mid-90s renovation of the Brooklyn Bridge subway. Large tiles and name plates covered up most of the beauty of the original stop.

The Brooklyn Bridge's pioneering use of steel cables and a suspended roadway are repeatedly referenced in the design of artist Mark Gibian's work, who created the sculpture Cable Crossing (1996) for the MTA Arts & Design program. Within the west mezzanine a web of cables recalls the graceful forms of the bridge, while overhead a 30-square foot structure, suspended beneath a skylight, frames the cable work. At the turnstiles, three panels that also use cables serve as a functional barrier.

Cable Crossing (1996) by sculptor Mark Gibian uses some of the original suspension cable from the Brooklyn Bridge to evoke its presence in the station. The "lacy" curves of the panels "echo the beauty of the bridge's cross-hatched cables and the feeling of flight as it springs across the East River."

The energy of Cable Crossing suggests "the controlled power of the subway and its network of metal and concrete that undergirds the city. I wanted to explore movement, using soft curves with hard materials," Gibian said.

Underground Art

THE ORIGINAL 28 STATIONS

City Hall

City Hall: Built and operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) — the city’s first subway company — City Hall opened in October 1904 with great fanfare, showing off its Heins & LaFarge tiling and Gustavino vaulted ceilings and skylights to New York society. Now shuttered, it is now seen by special appointment.

NEW YORK’S LIFEBLOOD IS ITS SUBWAYS.

Opened in 1904, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT)  laid down the first subway tracks in  New York. Others soon followed. Eventually, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) and the Independent Subway System (IND) would join in and form today’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) — the various signs still plastered all over the subway. Now comprising more than 840 miles of track, the New York subway sweeps an estimated 5.6 million commuters to their destinations across the five boroughs every day.

The subway system’s legacy runs as deep as the subterranean stations. And within those stations is a museum of priceless art, from the terra-cotta signs designed by architects George L. Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge to the enamels of Milton Glaser. MTA Arts & Design, the public-private partnership created to oversee the installation of permanent artworks in subway stations, now manages more than 300 works by world famous, mid-career and emerging artists — an “Underground Art Museum.”

For the record, there are two City Hall stations. The first directly under Manhattan’s City Hall and designed by NYC architects Chrisopher Heins & Grant LaFarge and Valencian architect Rafael Guastavino, closed in 1945.

Fascinated by the art of the subway as I used to cross from Grand Central Terminal to 42nd Street stations, I started photographing murals for an article in 2019. Seeing the metro stations on a trip to Uzbekistan made me realize the uniqueness of the canvases of New York even more. When the 2020 Coronavirus hit New York City in the winter of 2020, I continued the project — the art was now easier to access with subways emptied. The Art of the Subway became my pandemic project, and I visited nearly 400 MTA stations across four of the five boroughs. These are the images I took on those platforms, with captions I researched to give the art context and meaning. My only hope for this book is that it helps people realize that public art is everywhere, sometimes in the last place you might expect it.

Although beautiful, it became inconvenient to ride a local train when the express was a block away at Brooklyn Bridge stop. Secondly, the graceful curve of the station, didn’t accommodate longer cars.

Tours of old City Hall resumed just a few years ago and are available by joining the New York City Transit Museum.

Another shot of the Old City Hall station.

The City Hall R, W line, next to City Hall features more practical tiles by Squire Vickers, which helped illiterate riders discern their location.

The newer City Hall station lies just outside City Hall in Manhattan.