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| Re: Historic Subway Tiles With Nothing To Do With Racism Or Even Confederacy to be Removed (1447215) | |||
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Re: Historic Subway Tiles With Nothing To Do With Racism Or Even Confederacy to be Removed |
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Posted by Michael549 on Mon Aug 21 02:45:59 2017, in response to Re: Historic Subway Tiles With Nothing To Do With Racism Or Even Confederacy to be Removed, posted by Michael549 on Mon Aug 21 02:26:16 2017. I decided to look up Squire Vickers, to understand his influence upon the subways. Here's an article from the New York Times from 2007.------- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/arts/design/03subw.html?mcubz=0 ------- Art & Design Underground Renaissance Man: Watch the Aesthetic Walls, Please By RANDY KENNEDYAUG. 3, 2007 IF you’re looking for ways to wax poetic about the New York City subway and the vast planning that went into building it, Ibsen and Shakespeare may not be the first authors who leap to mind, especially as August settles its annual swelter on the tourist-packed platforms. Kafka maybe? Beckett? Dante? De Sade? But in 1916, in unlikely literary territory — The Public Service Record, a dry periodical about municipal works — a man named Squire J. Vickers, the subway’s chief architect, enlisted Ibsen to defend the new simplicity he was introducing into the designs of the Victorian-era system. “In his ability to omit, he is a past master,” Vickers wrote admiringly of that playwright. Then, in quick succession in the brief article, he made reference to Michelangelo, Millet, the Pharisees, Falstaff, Othello and Horatio and quoted from “Richard II” (“this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle”). It was, in short, another era, when the city’s builders still saw themselves as Renaissance men and moral torchbearers. But even in the context of his time Vickers was a dynamo, a grandiloquent eccentric whose other life as a painter often bled over into the subway; his taste in colors and geometric design can be still be seen throughout the system. For both aesthetic and budgetary reasons Vickers pushed the subway onto a much more pared-down, modern path than that of his Beaux-Arts predecessors. And maybe partly because of this his reputation has always seemed to be stuck somewhere in the tunnel behind them. But an exhibition that opened this week at the New York Transit Museum’s gallery in Grand Central Terminal may help to remedy that neglect and place Vickers more firmly among the forces that shaped the look of the city — or at least enormous swaths beneath it — in the 20th century. Continue reading the main story The show is the second part of an examination of subway architecture and design; the first part, which closed July 8, focused on the subway’s original designers, George L. Heins and C. Grant LaFarge, whose elaborately ornate subway stations from 1904 continue to be the system’s most recognizable emblems. Organized by Carissa Amash, a Transit Museum curator, the new show, “Squire Vickers and the Subway’s Modern Age,” tells the story of the man who, in almost 30 years as the system’s lead designer, was responsible for building more of today’s subway than any other architect: over 300 stations, many more than any other architect. The exhibition dusts off samples of the many lushly colored Arts and Crafts influenced mosaics that Vickers and his staff designed in the late teens and 1920s along new lines in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Their quiltlike geometric abstractions, evoking Piet Mondrian and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, began to put a straight edge to the subway’s swoops and curlicues, its terra-cotta cornucopias and floral medallions. “There seemed to be really no curves and almost no circles anymore — they just vanished,” Ms. Amash said one recent morning, carrying a pair of white gloves as she walked through the small exhibition space with drawings, pictures and excavated chunks of subway history around her on the walls and floor. (The steam-pipe explosion that burst through the pavement near Grand Central on July 18 happened on the very day the museum was awaiting delivery of many of its exhibits for the show. “It’s been crazy,” Ms. Amash said. “It’s New York.”) 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 the austerity of the Machine Age, reflected in the just-the-facts decoration, sans-serif type and solid colors of the Independent subway, the last major expansion, in the 1930s (stations that are now along the A, C, E and F lines, among others). “How grateful to the eye is the wall surface unbroken by paneling, noxious ornament or the misplaced string course, decorated, if you like, inlaid with color, but unbroken,” he wrote. In a wall text for viewers of the exhibition, Ms. Amash added that “instead of disguising the steel and concrete structure of the subway, Arts and Crafts design allowed Vickers to celebrate the subway’s underlying industrial character, exposing concrete vaulted ceilings and leaving steel girders unadorned.” But he was also imminently practical and, as subway projects lurched through the Depression — at one point, Ms. Amash said, all but nine subway architects were laid off, including, briefly, Vickers himself — many of his aesthetic decisions were driven by the bottom line. Mosaic elements were made flat, for example, in part “to avoid dust ledges,” he wrote, so they would be cheaper to clean. They could also be set by hand in the factory instead of piece by piece on the wall, making them less expensive to install. “With Heins and LaFarge,” Ms. Amash said, “there was a point at which it was like, ‘Hey guys, you’re going to have to rein in the costs,’ but with Vickers it was pretty much a tight budget from the get-go.” One of the mosaics designed by Squire J. Vickers, the subway’s chief architect, can be seen at the Bushwick station in Brooklyn on the L line. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times In one essay Vickers explained frankly why elevated stations, as any frequent subway rider can now see, ended up badly short-changed in the design department: “Our attempts to beautify have been of little avail, except in certain cases, on account of the cost.” And yet, in many places, in design elements like a flat mosaic picture plaque at the Canal Street station on Broadway — a representation of a stone bridge crossing the canal that was later to become Canal Street — Vickers was still able pull off beautiful low-cost effects. With its deep blues, yellows and reds, that plaque (one like it is on display in the exhibition) was designed by Jay Van Everen, one of Vickers’s best friends and a fellow painter, who attended Cornell University with Vickers. He served under Vickers, along with another painter friend of theirs, Herbert Dole, in what might be thought of as the short-lived mosaic picture-making studio for the subway, examples of which can also be seen at the Borough Hall station on the 2 and 3 line and at the Cortlandt Street station on the 1 line (now temporarily closed). “It was not the made-to-order special stuff that the first subway contracts had called for, but for delight in color I personally would choose Vickers,” said Philip Ashforth Coppola, who has been at work for the last 30 years on a series of self-published books about the subway’s design and who, in the mid-1980s, interviewed Ruth Vickers, then elderly, about her father. The exhibition also displays numerous sketches and architectural drawings, brass lamps and wall sconces, Art-Deco-style metal grilles and the occasional wild design indulgence, usually produced for prominent subway entrances, like an elaborate lighted sign flanked by brass seahorses that was installed near the Graybar Building. Quoting from Vickers’s copious writings and displaying several of his colorful, Fauve-ish paintings, the show communicates a strong sense of him as part of a certain turn-of-the-century breed of urban optimist, those who believed that practical know-how, yoked together with art and culture, could solve most of cities’ problems. Few things seemed to be too detailed or petty to draw his attention; he cautioned his builders against using fish glue behind subway tiles because “in warm weather it sometimes oozes out between the tile in black streaks.” And almost nothing passed through his typewriter without picking up a literary allusion or three, from Anatole France to Uncle Tom to the Old Testament. Writing about the noxious waters of the Gowanus Canal, over which an elevated subway line had just been built, he had the prophet Elisha commanding the leper Naaman to “dip thyself seven times in the Gowanus and be clean.” And then he commiserated with leper for not wanting to do so. As the architect of perhaps three quarters of the subway system, Vickers also lived what he preached, taking three forms of public transportation every day from his home in Grand View-on-Hudson in Rockland County to his office in Manhattan: a train to a ferry to a subway. His house and painting studio overlooking the Hudson, an Arts and Crafts cottage that he designed, was one of his life’s other great passions. He called the estate Over Joy, and he painted there prodigiously, often producing canvases of fantastical, almost science-fiction-like city scenes with geometric motifs that echoed the subway’s designs. “My question,” Ms. Amash said, “is when did he have time to paint?” He also wrote Romantic poetry that tended toward the overwrought. (A sample, called “The Sin of Michael Hanlon,” is in the exhibition: “Good Father Burke came through the storm at night to shrive the dying man.”) He decorated the house laboriously over the years with tile work reminiscent of the subway and installed carved and painted masks and designs on walls and fences. Mr. Copolla, who visited Ruth Vickers at the cottage in Grand View-on-Hudson several times before her death in 1990, recalled flourishes like handmade stained-glass lamps and curiosities like a bright blue elephant-head sculpture over a drain spout, so that the water came out through the trunk. “She’d kept it just the way he made it,” Mr. Copolla said of Vickers’s daughter, his only child, a teacher who never married. “It was like a museum to him.” Vickers probably would have liked it that way, if only to serve as an example to others of a life pretty well lived. “If we seek to discriminate,” he wrote once, “if we start out to find that which is best in art, it will permeate the entire life and rule of action. We shall take on larger views and become tolerant, charitable, sympathetic, for we shall have learned that ‘there are more things, Horatio, between heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.’ ” |
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