“To me, this calm is the essence of soul, so please, if only for a brief time in my busy day, let me at least have an empty arena where I can sit with my thoughts and wait for my ride without being assaulted by a visual message, however uplifting or community inspired such a message is intended to be.”
Arlington’s Lynda Meyers pointed out that there’s no money to redecorate the stations. Besides, she thinks using art to highlight the personality of each neighborhood is counter to the system’s region-wide character.
“It doesn’t just serve neighborhoods,” Lynda wrote. “It serves the whole (or nearly the whole) metropolitan area. The system-wide uniform decor is consistent with that role, and wiping it out would serve nobody’s interests (except presumably a few artists who got to design the ‘symbols’).”
David Hutt first came to Washington temporarily, as an intern in the early ’90s. Wrote David: “The high vaulted ceilings, clean uniform design, wide concourses and platforms, and the almost futuristic white flashing platform lights was unlike any other subway system in the United States.” Other cities had narrow tunnels, leaky ceilings and a piecemeal feel. Metro’s design “reflected some of the grandeur and intrigue of the city as the capital of a country emerging as the only superpower.”
Ten years later David moved back, to Arlington. Time had taken its toll on Metro: “Dirt and film dampened the lighting, stations began to look drab with missing or broken tiles, and concrete walls showed cracks and the dark accumulation of use.”
Then Metro replaced the white flashing platform lights with red ones, which to David suggest “some impending emergency.” He thinks Metro needs to restore the stations and the system to its earlier state.
Steve Auerbach of Bethesda has a different concern: When he’s dozed off for a moment, how does he know which station he’s at when all he can see are uniform, bland concrete walls?
“Sure the drivers announce the stops,” he wrote, “but we all know they are incomprehensible and when I wake from a ‘short nap’ the announcement I slept through about the next station does not help one bit.
“If they all have to look alike, there have to be many more identifying signs.”
That’s my biggest gripe, too. I was on the platform at Silver Spring the other day when the PA announced the next train would be terminating at Union Station. There is not a single, system-wide map on the platform at Silver Spring that I could have used to replan my route using the Green Line.
It’s a disgrace. Riders should be able to see one station name sign, one line-route map and one system-wide map from wherever they stand on the platform.
Pining for the fjords
I’ve seen a fair amount of odd advertisements in Metro — I always get a kick out of the ones encouraging me to purchase a battleship or jet fighter — but my current favorite is for Icelandair’s flights to Norway.
The ad shows two people suspended hundreds of feet above a fjord. They’re standing on a boulder pinned precariously between two rocky outcroppings. The oddest thing: The guys have bicycles.
Bicycles? Way up there? The bicycles look as inappropriate as an ironing board or a ping-pong table.
Harald Hansen of the Norway tourism office in New York told me the photo was taken at a place called Kjerag in the Lysefjord.
“I would say that the photo was taken to create a dramatic scenery,” Harald wrote in an e-mail. “It is not usual for people to bike up there.”
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