Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story

摘要

Fifteen years after New York City opened its inaugural subway line, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the American cultural critic Lewis Mumford observed the integrated function of underground rail transportation in an urban context. In a 1919 article for The Nation, Mumford argued that the subway turned goat pastures into 'immediately profitable' tenements.1 This technology inspired program of action-subway-transforming-pasture-into-tenement-precipitated a connectivity often disregarded by later critics of the subway. Notably, the urban planner and theorist Kevin Lynch remarked, '[T]he subway is a disconnected nether world, and it is intriguing to speculate what means might be used to mesh it into the structure of the whole [city].