Advent Calendar: Day 15

The Boston subway is the oldest in the US. Initially built in the 1890s, people thought the first segment running from Park St to Boylston was a bonkers idea. That chunk still exists, and is still in use. It's very historic, by which I mean the concrete spalling suggests that no one has laid a finger on the Boylston St station for at least 100 years. 

Other stations have slowly been refurbished, and one of the nicer things the MBTA does is make an attempt to leave some of the original mosaics and tilework when they gut everything else. The original stations date to the Beaux-Arts era, and although the signs are not as elaborate as some you might see in the Métro, they're still detailed and aesthetic work. These stations were meant to be show pieces when they were constructed; the late Victorians saw artwork, and culture in general, as part of man's triumph over nature. They would have been horrified by the later utilitarian forms of Brutalism. The modern signage is mainly meant to be easy to read, but the originals were also meant to be modern and pretty.

Some of the most recent projects have included preserving the original mosaic signs in Government Center, née Scollay Square, and working around the original tiles in the bus tunnels at Harvard. (The depicted sign, Scollay Under, designates the lower tracks of a station.) There have also been later additions to the artwork in T stops -- a commemorative mural in Park Street, a set of wind chimes between the tracks in Kendall, and the state-funded Arts on the T program, which has resulted in poetry on the platform at Davis, murals on the wall at South Station, and hundreds of neon tubes dripping from the ceiling at Alewife. 

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