For almost half the stations existence, this stuff covered the entire station, including the ticket hall. And then, in the 1980s, the TTC covered it up during\u00a0an aesthetically misguided modernization effort that also drove its famous subway font to the brink of extinction.<\/p>\n When the TTC was building\u00a0Canada’s first subway in early\u00a01950s, the transit agency’s in-house designers made numerous important choices that defined the look and feel of the Toronto transit system.<\/p>\n An artist\u00a0sketched out\u00a0a new logo for the subway, someone\u2014no-one knows who\u2014created an entirely new typeface\u00a0for use on the platform walls, and the chief engineer picked out a variety of shiny wall coverings in\u00a0Primrose (soft yellow,) English Eggshell (blue-green,) and Pearl Grey (off-white.)<\/p>\n According to the original tender documents stored at\u00a0the City of Toronto Archives, the colour scheme preferred by the TTC was supposed to\u00a0include Jade and Shell Pink tiles instead of English Eggshell. Unfortunately, pink\u00a0was out of stock, and Jade was considerably more expensive than\u00a0another option,\u00a0Alamo Tan, an earthy soil colour.<\/p>\n Additional confusion over pricing and available quantities resulted in Alamo Tan, Jade, and Shell Pink being dropped entirely, leaving just three colours to be repeated in a cycle between Union and Eglinton stations.<\/p>\n Four trim colours\u2014American Red, Forest Green, Cadet Blue, and Black\u2014used in a thin band near the ceiling ensured no two stations would be\u00a0entirely identical<\/a>.<\/p>\n The now-famous TTC font, developed in-house by the transit commission, matched the faintly retro\u00a0look of the Toronto subway.\u00a0Similar to Futura<\/a>, a font created\u00a0by German typeface designer Paul Renner in 1927, the TTC’s lettering was distinguished by perfectly round Os and Qs.<\/p>\n It also resembled Johnston<\/a>, the font used by Transport for London across the London Underground, but no-one is entirely sure who at the TTC came up with the original design.<\/p>\n “We don’t know who the draftsman was,” says Ian Dickson, the Manager of Design and Wayfinding at the TTC.\u00a0“It was in-house … there doesn’t appear to be any third parties on the drawings.”<\/p>\n Riders in the 1950s liked the crisp look of Canada’s\u00a0first subway.<\/p>\n “The subway has raised the horizons of our pride,” wrote the Globe and Mail\u00a0<\/em>in 1954.<\/p>\n “Toronto used to have the biggest this and the tallest that in the British Empire. Now our statistics are parlayed to the world: It’s the world’s cleanest, the only one that’s scrubbed down every night. It’s the most efficient subway … a\u00a0ride at the front window of the front car is still the biggest thrill in Toronto.”<\/p>\n The subway was really clean, too.<\/p>\n The TTC employed two janitors at each station and a roving squad of 10 overnight custodians. The walls were washed every day\u00a0with a wet vacuum cleaner, and sawdust and linseed soap were used to scrub the terrazzo tile floors. Garbage collection and sweeping was handled out of a converted streetcar that passed through the tunnels after the evening service ended.<\/p>\n In 1965, more than 10 years after the subway opened, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em> asked foreign correspondents in a number of cities around the world to investigate\u00a0the cleanliness of their nearest metro system. In the resulting story, H. E. Pettett, the secretary of the TTC, boasted that Toronto’s system was only rivalled by\u00a0Stockholm.<\/p>\n “New Yorkers describe the Toronto system as almost antiseptic,” the paper\u00a0reported.<\/p>\n At home, riders\u00a0(affectionately) described it as\u00a0world’s longest bathroom because of its polished\u00a0walls and floors.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the subway’s glass-faced tile didn’t stand up well against wear and tear. The wall pieces were prone to shattering and finding suitable replacements proved\u00a0difficult and expensive.\u00a0Vitrolite became scarce, only available through\u00a0salvage, and the fastidious attention to detail began to slip as the subway expanded in the 1960s and 70s.<\/p>\n Rather than viewing the subway system as a whole, the TTC began commissioning designs for each station individually. Arthur Erickson gave the city\u00a0Eglinton West and Yorkdale, and Dunlop-Farrow Architects created\u00a0Dupont and Lawrence West, but there was no longer a strong visual thread\u00a0tying the system together as whole.<\/p>\n Then, in 1982, the TTC overhauled\u00a0the original Yonge line stations, covering the original tile in wire mesh and mounting new, more durable tile. College went from\u00a0from blue-green to brown, Dundas went\u00a0a bilious green, and Rosedale got a sort of deep forest colour.<\/p>\n Writing in the Globe and Mail<\/em>, architect and urban planner George Kapelos called the new look a travesty.\u00a0“The tile is mottled and visually chaotic,” he wrote. “Colours are bland or jarring, with no overall unity or individual distinctiveness.”<\/p>\n The subway font also vanished with the new wall covering,\u00a0replaced by Univers, a widely used\u00a0Swiss font with the letters spaced closer together. “It is a classic case of the ordinary replacing the special,”\u00a0Kapelos wrote.\u00a0“Toronto’s earliest flirtation with modernization has been replaced by the blandness of beige and universal lettering.”<\/p>\n Until the billboards came down at College station,\u00a0the dusty but otherwise intact tile had been hidden from public view for more than 30 years. The reemergence attracted a significant amount of attention on social media\u2014someone even wrote “love vitrolite” in the dust.<\/p>\n Perhaps a sign of increasing appreciation and respect\u00a0for the TTC design standards of old.<\/p>\n For what it’s worth, the perennially cash-strapped TTC appears to be increasingly engaged in preserving its own history. In 2013, the commission created a design and wayfinding team, which overhauled the classic subway font, adding numbers, missing punctuation, and correcting problems with some of\u00a0the letters.<\/p>\n “The S was out of balance, always seemed to be falling backwards,” says\u00a0Dickson. “The diagonal strokes in the R, Q, and K weren’t matching, so when you put those letters side by side, they were all at slightly different angles. We went in and redrew the entire typeface, mostly from the original scans.”<\/p>\n Dickson said his team added punctuation and numbers, so new stations like Highway 407 can be rendered in the typeface in the coming years.<\/p>\n Called Bloor-Yonge, the updated version of the\u00a0font is now used on\u00a0the official company\u00a0letterhead, in the Ride Guide, and on the monthly Metropass.\u00a0When Union station was overhauled as part of\u00a0work to add a second platform, workers didn’t bring back the yellow tile, but the\u00a0name of the station was rendered faithfully in the TTC’s famous lettering.<\/p>\n “There is a very intentional effort to bring back the classic subway font to our facilities,” says Ian Dickson, the TTC’s manager of design and wayfinding.\u00a0“It just seemed like the right thing to do. I get very little criticism when it comes to bringing back the subway font into our signage.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"toronto](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2015\/11\/20151123-Vitrolite-Union.jpg\")
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