18th Old and New

I wanted to take a walk up 5th Avenue from 18th Street to Central Park recently, which I had not done for Forgotten New York for awhile; results will pop up on that website in due course. To get there, I got on a downtown #1 at 34th/Penn and got off at 18th and walked over. The 7th Avenue line was extended south along 7th Avenue, Varick Street, West Broadway and Trinity Place to South Ferry in 1918.

By that time, the terra cotta subway signage and appointment conceived of by the Interborough Rapid Transit’s original station designers Heins & LaFarge had given way to somewhat cheaper mosaic tiling designed by artist Squire Vickers, who took over as chief subway designer and was responsible for later IRT, BMT and IND station signs. The tiled station ID tablet at 18th Street is one of those. Vickers mostly stuck to subdued earth tones, heavy on brown, green and dark blue; later BMT stations on the Canarsie and Flushing Lines (built as a joint IND/BMT line) used more of the spectrum. Note that the strip along the roofline is also a continuous mosaic tablet.

Toward the south end of the station it changes character somewhat, as 7th Avenue stations were extended south in the mid-20th Century to accommodate longer trainsets. In the 1990s, the walls on this extension were updated and redecorated. The roofline mosaic tiles were not extended, though, and unicolored tiles resembling the ones used in IND stations were employed instead.

18th Street was among the first older IRT stations to receive new mosaic tiled station tablets. (On the Broadway BMT, original mosaic tablets were covered over with new concrete blocks and simplified Helvetica/Standard signage; most of the ones in Manhattan were removed in the 1990s when stations were renovated.

The new 18th Street signs are of poor quality and appear to be a computer rendering imitative of the older tablets. I’ll give them a C for nice try, but they’re nowhere close to the Squire Vickers originals.

Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)