Most of the best observations are not the ones we set out to find, but the ones we notice along the way to somewhere else. Imagine my giddy surprise when, on my way back from a midtown lunch waiting for an uptown 1 train at Columbus Circle, I noticed a couple guys in hardhats exposing the gem pictured above as they were ripping off a couple of decades of nondescript glazed tile from on top of it. It was unclear when I was taking this picture if the tile was to remain as part of the current reconstruction project!
Columbus Circle is the latest major subway hub to undergo reconstruction & modernization. The IRT line running through it is on the original subway line inaugurated in October 1904 that ran from City Hall up the east side, across 42nd Street, and then up Broadway to W. 145th Street. The handsome ceramic plaque above indicates that some of the ceramic tile in the station was compliments of the American Encaustic Tiling Co. from Zanesville, Ohio. Encaustic tiling was a decorative form of tiling regaining popularity at the turn of the 20th century due, in some part, to the renewed interest in aesthetic flourishes in municipal and public structures known as the City Beautiful movement and, itself, an outgrown of the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It instigated and celebrated other such wonderful public works as the ornate whimsical entrances of the Paris Metro but is known locally to most people through the thoughtful tile mosaics in subway stations--both in the original and updated--and the birth of the Municipal Art Society.
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