Wonderful blue gray Art Deco letter-form salt and pepper shaker set. They are 3 inches tall.
The font seems incredibly familiar. The ‘S’ at least is vaguely similar to the one in Richard Koch’s Neuland font (1920′s) and has the Streamline Moderne letter form of the 1930′s , but I couldn’t find an exact example. Even my big book of trademarks from the era didn’t help. This isn’t unusual, but you’d think there would have been something vaguely similar that would help a quality used merchandise purveyor write a slightly interesting blog post.
But no, instead I’m left with two lonely letters.
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I’ve thought a lot about typography lately. It started after I was stuck in New York for a night (Note: If you’re going to be stuck somewhere, New York beats the heck out of Atlanta). I thought I’d make the most of the opportunity.
I took the subway into Brooklyn to visit a friend and checked out the scenery on the way. This included the typography of subway station platform signs. The lettering at several of the stations between JFK and Broadway Junction were done with tile in a large, strong, sans-serif, white on purple/blue late 1940′s block font. I wouldn’t call it ugly, but it’s not terribly attractive either.
At Broadway Junction the station sign was in a conservative, small, nicely designed Art Deco font. My understanding is that the ‘Broadway’ tiles are original but the ‘Junction’ letters were replacements for the station’s former second name ‘East New York’. These were installed when the Broadway Junction station was renovated in the early 2000′s.
I had to transfer to the L to get to the country club which gave me a chance to see some more great station signs. All the stations I went through had a strong serif font on multi-colored tile background for the station names. At Bushwick this was done with white letters on earth-tone tiles, a few stops later the earth-tones had been replaced by blues and pale greens, and at my stop they had mixed all of them together.
This is one element of design that distinguishes older public works projects from contemporary ones. If these were contemporary construction you could be assured that a project director would have standardized signage to save costs. Along with other standardization in design and materials, this goes a long way in making any one place in the system interchangeable with any other. When every place looks like any place they all become equally expendable.
Like airports, stations become so interchangeable that they then set aside money for “distinctive architectural elements” in an effort to solve the problem, thereby missing the crux of it entirely. That’s the thing I love about older cities and civil works projects. You might not know where you are, but you know it’s someplace.
And that someplace is definitely not Atlanta.
