JUST outside the turnstiles in the concourse of the 14th Street station on the IND 8th Avenue line (A, C, E trains) there’s a handsomely lettered sign in the black and gold signage that marks the rest of the station, with the addition of a red arrow. It points to the Port Authority Building (111 8th Avenue) which is no longer occupied by the agency.
The builders of the Independent Subway, constructed mostly in the 1930s, decided to color code station signage according to a system largely forgotten today. Local station ID mosaics and signage were the same color…that changed at express stations. The reasons for this system are fuzzy. It has been rumored that subway stations designer Squire Vickers wanted to give people who could not read English a good idea where thery were by identifying neighborhoods with colors. Your guess is as good as mine.
The color settled upon at the express 14th Street station and local 23rd Station on the 8th Avenue line was gold (or yellow). At the 34th Street express station, the color changed to maroon. As it happens, gold signage fits in with what you find above the station, as the Port Authority Building is also trimmed in gold.
111 8th avenue is one of the few NYC buildings that take up an entire square block: between 8th and 9th Avenue and West 15th and 16th Streets. It’s an Art Moderne classic constructed in 1932 and designed by Lusby Simpson of Abbott, Merkt & Co. as the Port Authority Commerce Building. It was a multi-use building designed to be used as a trucking terminal and also to handle exhibitions and manufacturing.
At its peak in the 1930s the Port Authority serviced 8000 tons of goods in the building and as many as 650 trucks passed into the building daily. The building has 15 floors the size of football fields.
As less shipping took place on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River the building lessened in importance, but it did serve as Port Authority headquarters from 1947 to 1980 1973. For about a decade beginning in 1998 Taconic Investment Partners owned the building and used it as a data center during the internet boom.
In 2010 the building was acquired by internet giant Google, which installed large white logos on the 8th and 9th Avenue sides. However, Art Deco details in gold finish at the building’s entrances have remained intact. Too many years ago for me to remember clearly what year it was, I attended an information meeting in this building about Google Adsense, whose ads you see on Forgotten NY. About 20 minutes in, I gave up as it was too much tech gobbledygook for me to understand. I was the oldest one in the room by about 20 years.
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8/26/24