It was the letter J that opened the door for Helvetica into the subways. Today, Helvetica — a 1950s-era typeface that has gained fame and popularity because of its versatility — is the official standard in the New York City transit system. But that has been true for only 20 years or so.
The legacy of the 104-year history of the subway, itself a belated amalgamation of three separate systems, has resulted in a hodgepodge of signs in different styles, materials and sizes. Some have been preserved because of their historical significance. Others remain because they were overlooked or forgotten in subsequent renovations (a stark sign in the Port Authority was left over from the 1950s). We often overlook them in our harried daily commuting. But the passing glimpses of the signs are faint echoes of past fashions, mores and eras.
City Room took a daylong tour with Paul Shaw, a New York historian who has an encyclopedic knowledge of signs in the in the city and the subway system (see his recent article). He is known to scold people for confusing the terms “typeface,” “lettering” and “font.” (The word “font,” familiar in an age of software drop-down menus, has alas become conflated with “typeface” in general conversation.)
Only a typeface aficionado like Mr. Shaw can point out remnants of Helvetica’s predecessor — Standard (also known as Akzidenz Grotesk) — scattered around the underground labyrinth. Mr. Shaw says the subway design team original chose Standard as the universal typeface in 1966, not Helvetica. A manual of that time declared that “of the various weights of sans serif available, Standard Medium has been found to offer the easiest legibility from any angle, whether the passenger is standing, walking or riding.” (Sign legibility when your audience is in motion continues to be a vexing problem.)
Helvetica only became the standard typeface for the subway system in recent decades. (Photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters) Helvetica was originally created in Switzerland. It was a neutral typeface from a neutral country and gained runaway popularity starting in the 1960s for its modern grace. But the subway system looked elsewhere.
“It was an incredibly courageous thing to do at a time when Helvetica was riding high,” Mr. Shaw said.
The differences between Standard and Helvetica, both sans-serif faces that lack little strokes (or “serifs”) that terminate the principal strokes of a letter, are subtle, most noticeable in the ends of characters like the C, 2, 3 and 5. The J was a particular problem in Standard — because in certain subway maps and signs, the J wasn’t hooky enough, Mr. Shaw says. The Helvetica J, on the other hand, had quite a firm curve, which made it the J of choice for an updated subway maps and trains.
Thus, between 1980 and 1989, Helvetica “crept into the system.”
Before the sans-serif rivalry of recent decades, there was the golden age of the serif typeface in the subway systems. The earliest station signs were often in ornate terra cotta forms, colored in part because early subway designers wanted people to be able to identify their stops while they were in a fast-moving train.
From 1901 to 1908, John L. Heins and Christopher G. LaFarge designed the earliest subway motifs in the popular Beaux-Arts style, evoking classical architecture using ceramics, metal and wood. It was an aesthetic of swoops and curlicues, cornucopias and floral medallions. These terra cotta signs can still been seen at Bleecker Street and Spring Street on the No. 6. line, and the Borough Hall stop on the No. 4 and 5 lines.
A successor, Squire J. Vickers (one of the coolest names in New York City history!) pared down their ornate style, in part because of his minimalist aesthetic and in part because of the economics of the Great Depression. Mr. Vickers, who was the architect for perhaps three-quarters of the system, is largely known for his mosaics, which were practical in that they were easier to clean because of their flat surfaces.
The mosaics of those days were hand cut and hand assembled by craftsmen, with precision yet irregularities. Over time, as stations have been renovated, the original mosaic motif has been mimicked, with mixed results. Among the nicer additions: a Chinatown station that now has Chinese characters in mosaic form at Canal Street. But on the No. 1 platform at 34th Street, Mr. Shaw pointed out an original hand-assembled mosaic that was probably an original from the opening of the station. Then he pointed out a neighboring mosaic sign that had been clearly machine-cut because the curves were too smooth and it was missing fine details. He shuddered. But it was nothing compared with the horror he felt at a mosaic at the 18th Street stop on the No. 1, where the proportions of the typeface were simply all wrong.
At some stations, there is a odd splicing of signs and styles — half traditional and half modernist. That’s because of the station expansions that happened after increasing ridership forced the IRT’s five-car local stations to be lengthened to accommodate longer trains in the 1940s and ’50s.
A sign from an R1 subway car, built in the 1930s for use by the IND system. (Photo: Preston Rescigno/Getty Images) Meanwhile, a bewildering array of signs had accumulated, according to Mr. Shaw: porcelain enamel and hand painted, directional and informational, serif and sans serif, blue and green. There was no unified style, or as Mr. Shaw puts it less tactfully, it was a “visual mess.”
The current unified New York subway system began to take shape when the city took over the bankrupt Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) in 1940, eventually merging them over time with the city-operated Independent lines (IND). The IND — which started in the 1920s and includes the A, B, C and D lines — always used sans serif (think of old images from “Take the A Train,” not a serif anywhere to be seen).
In addition, after a decade of construction, a new mile-long tunnel connection opened up in 1967, changing the travel patterns of thousands of commuters by allowing trains from Brooklyn to have access to a number of the north-south Manhattan lines and creating a number of new (free!) transfer connections.
“No one could understand those signs because of the confusion,” Mr. Shaw said.
And the signs weren’t entirely updated for the change. A mild panic set in at the Atlantic Avenue station when officials arrived early to find old signs still hanging, prompting them to cover the outdated signs and maps with newspapers, according to research Mr. Shaw did at the time.
The resulting subway map, as one writer put it in 1968, was “a battlefield filled with typographers and color-experts locked in mortal combat.”
With a spaghetti bowl of subway lines, transit officials began debating a move to color-coded system in the 1960s, where each line would be assigned its own color.
But then the subway declared a unified system of signs. An early design template for sign was touse black and red writing on a white background. But that was changed to the white on black we know today when transit officials determined that those would be easier to read in low light of the subway system. Some of the few remnants from that era can be seen at Bowling Green stop on the No. 4 and 5 lines.
Helvetica ousted Standard by 1989, though today the emergence of digital signs — like those on the L line platforms and the N/R subway lines — has demanded the adaptation of new typefaces, some which impress Mr. Shaw with their form and functionality. Others less so.
And around the subway system, Standard can still be spotted. At the Chambers Street station on the No. 1, 2 and 3 lines, a Helvetica sign and a Standard sign sit directly opposite each other on neighboring pillars. And many subway cars still have their four-digit numbers written in Standard.
And sometimes, Helvetica and Standard may have mated and produced an offspring. At one subway stop, Mr. Shaw stopped to squint at a sign that read “Station Dept Cleaners Rm.” The sign was mostly in the Standard typeface, except for the capital R, he pointed out.
The Standard R has a straight diagonal leg, while this one was curved, like the one in Helvetica. “Always look at the capital R,” he said, “because it can tell you a lot.” (Others who are finely attuned to typefaces are often jarred when Helvetica is misused in movies, appearing as an anachronism.)
“We’ve got a mutant,” he declared, as he took out his camera and snapped a photo.
Mosaics of terra cotta with serif lettering were used in the early days of the subway, and many — like this one — still survive.
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