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Obsessed Williamsburg Man Creates Website Devoted To Subway Mosaic Art
By
Ben Yakas
Published May 21, 2014
Modified May 21, 2014
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By
Ben Yakas
Published May 21, 2014
Modified May 21, 2014
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Last year, two twenty-something lovebirds challenged themselves to take selfies at every subway station in Manhattan in a day, resulting in a very sweet personal project covering all 118 stations in the borough. It took that couple about nine hours to traverse the entire system, but for freelance art director Adam Chang, it took quite a bit longer to capture what he needed for his own ode to the unique graphics in every station in our mass transit system: "I started last year, it took 20 hours just to ride all the trains and see all the stops in Manhattan," Adam Chang told us. "After that I don't even know how many hours I spent recreating all the signs haha."
The result of all those sweaty hours underground is called NY Train Project, an online gallery of subway stations in Manhattan. Chang, 32, explained the concept behind the website, which lets you navigate from station to station to see the different designs of the signs: "I first started paying attention after noticing the Bleecker sign on the 6 train," he said. "I've seen this sign many times but on that day I just starred at it a bit longer, maybe there was a train delay that caused to take a longer look. After that, I began paying more attention to the all the signs and from there I thought it would be interesting and challenging to recreate all of them and present them online in a way that users would see them as if their riding the train."
Chang, who lives in Williamsburg, also included some fun facts about each station, like that the ceramic artwork at the 103rd Street station on the 6 line is called Neo-Boriken, the Fulton Street station on the Z line is 1 of only 4 stations that do not operate 24/7, and that the 215th Station on the 1 line is the least used in the city.
He adds that he definitely plans on extending the projecting to the other boroughs: "The other neighborhoods were always part of the plan," he said. "It probably wouldn't be close to being up if I waited to finish all boroughs so I had to start with just one. There's also other things I want to do with it but one step at a time."
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manhattan
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ny train project
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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