So there I was, idling on a wicker seat on a 1910s BMT B-Type “Standard” subway car making its way down the Q line from 96th Street to Coney Island on a Transit Museum nostalgia train run, when I spotted the best Transit Authority logo ever designed as the train was passing a substation located at the south end of West 6th Street, where the F train joins the interlocking group of subway elevated tracks. After debarking the traincar, I staggered over to see if I could get a picture. The substation is well fenced off, but I was able to use the zoom and shoot through the chain link fence to get a photo of the medallion on the north side of the substation.
The Transit Authority only employed the interlocking TA logo from 1962 to 1968. After that, the agency was called the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the two-toned “M” (see the logos on this page) ruled from 1968 to 1994, replaced by the “Doppler” logo with MTA letters getting smaller as they recede, as train noise gets fainter when it passes at high speeds.
I don’t know the designer, but it’s certainly Glaser-worthy. The blue and orange in the logo are the official colors of New York State (which is why the Knicks were blue and orange, but not why the Mets wear the colors; in baseball, blue and orange were the colors of the Dodgers and Giants.
I have seen the interlocking TA elsewhere around town, most recently on Fulton street under the el in East New York; but they have to be in out of the way, unnoticed places, lest the control freaks at the MTA take notice of them.
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7/13/22