Drink Your School, Stay In Drugs, And Don’t Do Milk!

I don’t quite understand what Ibsen has to do with those fanciful mosaics in the subway stations, but they’re pretty kick-ass, I’ll give you that:

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.

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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.