| Underground Art Gallery.
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 One of the most eclectic, delightful art collections you've never heard of
lies under the streets of New York City. Its more than 700 miles of
galleries are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Millions of people
visit every day without realizing it.
When the first passengers began riding the New York City subway system in
1904, they found richly-colored ceramic mosaics and detailed glazed terra
cotta plaques which designers hoped would shape the look of the city, or at
least enormous swaths beneath it. It was another era, when the city's
builders still saw themselves as Renaissance men. The subway's chief
architect, Squire J. Vickers, a Cornell man, was a grandiloquent eccentric
whose other life as a painter influenced the colors and geometric design of
mosaic elements, made flat, he explained, "to avoid dust ledges," so they
would be cheaper to clean.
As urban legend has it, the station-specific plaques and color schemes were
planned to help illiterate or non-English-speaking immigrants identify the
stops. While that may have ended up as the practice, the images that both
captivated the eye and provided a visual reference to neighborhoods above.
These wonderful works of public art have been faithfully reproduced, with
the look and feel of the original underground ceramics. True colors are
locked into the 1/4-inch tile substrate (do not permanently place in direct
sunlight; do not wash with abrasive materials or harsh detergents). Each
decorative piece comes with (removeable) mounting hardware on the reverse.
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33rd street
Located at the intersection of Park Avenue and 33rd Street in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, the station was recently renovated, and contains an eagle plaque with the numerals "33".
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42nd Street
The street has held a special place in New York lingo since at least the turn of the twentieth century. 42nd Street lines some of New York's most important buildings, including the United Nations, Chrysler Building, Grand Central Station, Times Square, and the Port Authority Bus Station.
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Astor Place
Named for John Jacob Astor, the richest person in the United States at the time. The industrious beaver alludes to an early source of his wealth: pelts for gentlemen’s top hats. The strong 1904 design, vivid colors and large size of the plaques make them unusually effective in identifying the station.
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Bleecker Street
These 1904 bold, oval plaques with their heavy, ornate borders mark the famous street in Greenwich Village. The street is a spine that connects a neighborhood today popular for music venues and comedy, but was once a major center for American bohemia.
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Brooklyn Bridge
Though a part of New York City, Brooklyn maintains a distinct character of its own. Enriched by an almost unparalleled cultural diversity, a cutting-edge art scene, strong neighborhoods, and phenomenal Nineteenth Century architecture, Brooklyn is New York's most populous borough, with nearly 2.5 million residents.
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Chambers Street irt - Kings College
This 1918 plaque depicts an original building of Kings College, chartered in 1754, with two robed students in the foreground. At the time of independence from England, the college changed its name to Columbia College.
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City College/137th Street
City College's campus is on a hill overlooking Harlem; its neo-Gothic campus was mostly designed by George Browne Post, and many of its buildings are landmarks. The bas relief seal of City College represents past, present and future, and was incorporated into a larger mosaic panel in this 1904 station.
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Columbia University Seal
The oldest institution of higher education in the state of New York and the sixth-oldest such institution in the United States. This 1904 Grueby work features Columbia University’s seal, encircled by a wreath. It is the focal point of a heavily decorated panel situated high on the wall of the station.
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Columbus Circle/59th Street
A New York landmark, named for Christopher Columbus, the site of the first traffic circle in the United States. It is located at the intersection of Broadway, Central Park West, Central Park South (59th Street), and Eighth Avenue, at the southwest corner of Central Park.
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Grand Central
Built by the New York Central Railroad in the heyday of American long-distance passenger trains, it is the largest train station in the world. The original large and imposing scale was intended to enhance competition with the arch-rival Pennsylvania RailroadIts. Its mosaic motif of a 19th century bell-stacked steam engine with cow catcher was designed by Jay Van Everen in 1918.
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Borough Hall “BH”
The mezzanine walls features an intricate intertwined "BH" mosaic, commemorating ground-breaking ceremonies for New York's municipally-owned subway system, held in March, 1900, at Borough Hall in Manhattan.
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South Ferry
This station’s curved wall, tracing the southern tip of Manhattan, is quite ornate with large "South Ferry" mosaic name panels and terra-cotta sailing ship plaques by Heins & La Farge. The inner platform has small "SF" tile mosaics. There are fancy rosettes around removed old light fixtures and along the ceiling.
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Union Square/14th Street
Union Square is noted for its impressive mosaic of a Lossing-Barrett drawing in the New York Common Council Manual, entitled "Junction of Broadway and the Bowery Road, 1828." Union Square is a popular meeting place, given its central location in Manhattan and due to the fact that many subway lines stop at Union Square Station.
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Brooklyn bridge at Chambers Street
The large plaques in this station bridge the architectural eras of Heins and LaFarge, who designed them, and Vickers, who executed the work in 1913. They display the Manhattan Pier of the Brooklyn Bridge minus the cables and the Statue of Liberty in the background.
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Atlantic Avenue
Dubbed the "Champs-Élysées of Brooklyn," Atlantic Avenue is one of Brooklyn’s main thoroughfares. At Flatbush, the smaller shops, restaurants, churches and boutiques give way to the Atlantic Avenue Terminal, where nine subway lines of the MTA converge with the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR).
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Fulton Street
The line starts in Manhattan and emerges to cross the Williamsburg Bridge and becomes the BMT Jamaica Line in Brooklyn. The decorative plaque in this station commemorates the successful Hudson River launch of the Clermont by steamship entrepreneur Robert Fulton. It was made by Rookwood Pottery for the station opening in 1905.
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Christopher Street/Sheridan Square
Its reputation as the gayest street in the Village dates back at least to World War II, when it provided R&R for gay sailors. By 1953, Wonderful Town was singing with a wink about how "such interesting people live on Christopher Street." Its subway plaque was designed by Herbert Dole in 1918.
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Wall Street
Considered to be the historical heart of the Financial District, it was the first permanent home of the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street's architecture is generally rooted in the Gilded Age, reflected in the intricate subway plaque made by Rookwood Pottery.
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Columbia University/116th Street
The oldest institution of higher education in the state of New York and the sixth-oldest such institution in the United States. This 1904 Grueby work features Columbia University’s seal, encircled by a wreath. It is the focal point of a heavily decorated panel situated high on the wall of the station.
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Times Square
In the early 1900s The New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs moved the paper's operations to 42nd Street in the middle of the area known as Longacre Square. Ochs persuaded Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. to build a subway station there and rename it Times Square. It has achieved the status of an iconic world landmark and has become a symbol of its home city. The large subway tiles are among the most ornate in the entire system.
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Clark Street/Brooklyn Heights
Situated so close to the foot of Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights is serviced by numerous subway lines. The station plaque is a Jay Van Everen design, depicting busy East River docks in 1919. A duplicate plaque in the Whitney Museum’s collection documents the identity of the artist. These are the largest of the subway’s mosaic plaques.
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