137th Street City College
Two artworks landed at 137th Street, old and new — but no less monumental
Next stop, 137th Street and City College, which was the first publicly funded university in New York. We are almost at the end of the original 28 stations of the subway. Only one more to go: 145th Street. Squire Vickers personally oversaw the mosaic and cartouches decorated with an image of Janus, the Roman god who presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The sculpture relates to the motto of the City College of New York, located just east of the station: Respice, Adspice, Prospice in Latin, which means Look behind, look here, look ahead — the three provinces of scholarship.
In designing the 1907 campus for the City College at Amsterdam Avenue and 138th Street, the architect George B. Post wanted a design to counter McKim, Mead & White’s lofty, imperial Roman-style Columbia College and a Renaissance-style campus for New York University’s Bronx branch to the North (now Bronx Community College). Post chose a rugged Gothic style in Manhattan schist, set off with brilliant white terra cotta for the campus. To complement to simplicity of the architecture of the campus buildings, Squire Vickers also went with a pared back subway design. And while the three faces of Janus seem three-dimensional, that is an optical illusion well-honed by Vickers and the painters with whom he worked.
On the ground level of 137th Street/City College, is Steve Wood's artwork Fossils (1988) which consists of 160 eight-by-eight-inch bronze relief tiles (80 each on the uptown and downtown platforms) embedded in the platform walls of the station. The tiles portray the fossilised remains of a variety of biological life. “The idea behind Fossils is simple: the subway is underground, fossils are found in the earth,” Wood says. “I wanted these reliefs to be ‘scattered’ over the walls of the northbound and southbound platforms… They are meant to be looked at, touched, talked about, and remembered.”
To get there: Take the uptown 2, 3 from any train downtown to 96th Street. Switch to the 1 train from exit at 137th Street, exit the train. The Fossils are immediately outside the train, while the Vickers mosaic is on the Southbound side near the station exit.
A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:
From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway is available.
Absolutely captivating! I've always been intrigued by how art integrates into public spaces, especially within urban transit networks.
Thanks for the memory. This was my subway stop when I attended the High School of Music & Art in the late 1960's. M&A is now called Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts iand is housed near Lincoln Center.