For the subway literati among us, a quiz: Can you name the colors of the above subway bullets — less the G train — as the MTA describes them? The answers are in invisible text at the end of the post.
As a companion piece to his take on the changing Transit signage, New York Times scribe Michael Grynbaum profiled the MTA’s color schemes this afternoon. He writes of the unique names the MTA gives its subway bullets and of the history as well:
Every shade in the subway color scheme has a secret name, known only to the handful of transit workers who oversee the system’s maps and signs. But on a recent visit to the New York City Transit sign shop in Brooklyn, Off The Rails was offered a glimpse at the palette. The colors, which have stayed static since the map changed to its current design in 1979, are provided by an outside paint supplier for use on the system’s signs. Each shade has its own moniker…
Colors are assigned based on a subway route’s “trunk line” – that is, which avenue it runs along in Manhattan. (This might provide fodder to those who feel the city’s transit service is biased toward Manhattanites.) The recent decision to re-route the M line up Avenue of the Americas, instead of its previous run into southern parts of Brooklyn, is why the route is about to lose its [brown] tint…
Subway colors have shifted over time. The scheme now in place was adapted from the Modernist map by Massimo Vignelli in the early 1970s, an abstract masterpiece that was scrapped because its right angles left riders too confused. Some of Mr. Vignelli’s colors were kept in place, according to Michael Hertz, the designer of the subsequent, less right-angled 1979 map. “We felt there was a familiarity already with dark blue on Eighth Avenue,” Mr. Hertz said in a recent interview.
But Mr. Hertz, whose firm is still in charge of maintaining the transportation authority’s maps, said he was skeptical of a few of his predecessor’s other choices. “His Lex colors were weak,” Mr. Hertz said. “One was a pink, one was a light gray.”
These little idiosyncrasies are what makes the New York City subway system so fascinating to me. In Washington, D.C., the routes were pre-planned and have been saddled with boring names. The red line goes somewhere; the blue lines goes elsewhere; and the green line wanders its way through the District. Even the board game Clue had more compelling names. In New York, though, the mixture of colors, numbers and letters lends the map an air of organization amidst the chaos of a system that emerged from three competing subway companies in the 1940s.
And now for the great color reveal. Highlight the text to read the answers to the quiz and learn about Transit’s own monikers for what we call red, green, purple, blue, gray, yellow and brown. As often happens with the poor, neglected G train, its color merited nary a mention in Grynbaum’s article. Answers: tomato red (1, 2, 3), apple green (4, 5, 6), raspberry (7), vivid blue (A, C, E), bright orange (B, D, F, V), slate gray (L, S), sunflower yellow (N, Q, R, W) and terra cotta brown (J, M, Z)
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