Stained Glass on the Subway

As the MTA rehabilitates subway and train stations across the city, about 1% of its annual budget is allotted for installing permanent art installations intended to “raise the quality of the ride.” It’s a fantastic program that means you could enter the 4-Train station at 167th St & Jerome in the Bronx…

…and see this design by Carol Sun brightening up the corridor, a very nice surprise when scouting on gray winter days.

Or, if you’re one stop down at Jerome & 170th Street (Bronx)…

…you’ll see this by artist Dina Bursztyn (note what I think are black crows along the lower ring in the left-hand piece)…

…and this…

…and this.

It’s pretty easy for subway commuters to take this type of thing for granted, myself very much included, but I think we can all agree that these do substantially raise the quality of the our ride.

For anyone who has ever wondered about an installation at a particular stop or wanted to find out what you’ve missed in your daily rush, the MTA’s Arts for Transit site is an incredibly helpful resource in which you can look up stations by line, see photos of installations, and read explanations for the works.

Not only did I find many, many pieces that I’ve personally missed in my own travels, the explanations are really useful for fully appreciating such amazing works as the eerie (and somewhat subversive) Penn Station wall murals, the Alice in Wonderland mosaics at 50th Street, the floating hat mosaics at 23rd Street, and my two personal favorites (photos courtesy the MTA and Flickr friends), the underwater mosaics at Houston St…

…and the brilliant installations at the Natural History Museum/81st Street Stop, if for no better reason than the T-Rex wall fossil…

…the layers of the Earth’s crust…

…the underwater mosaic as you descend the steps…

…and the mosaic animals coupled with outlines of extinct relatives in gray.

Doesn’t really matter what borough you’re in, I have yet to visit any city with subway stations as great as New York’s. Seeing stained glass at a Bronx subway station on a cold winter day can drive that home.

-SCOUT