My favourite San Francisco subway station – Forest Hill (née Laguna Honda) – celebrated its 100th birthday earlier this year.pic.twitter.com/P0efkcSFNn
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Sure, there are some nice moments, like the (recent) rainbow escalators in the Castro district, bold colours, or incidental art.pic.twitter.com/U7tfeJrl0J
And outside of the boring and predictable Helvetica/Frutiger combination, there is some wonderful (if rare!) type, if you really look for it.pic.twitter.com/dbOlRFZcIx
But otherwise it’s like utilidors under Disney World – often feeling like you’re not actually meant to be there, with the stations, the trains, and the signage being almost… repulsive.pic.twitter.com/dPaRP0lQ2r
…except, that is, for Forest Hill Station. It was built in 1918, and for many decades served regular streetcars that travelled underground. (Eventually, the rest of the metro was built up, and streetcars replaced by light rail.)pic.twitter.com/VoA8uecAY8
It’s the deepest station in the system. Its elevators remind me of London…pic.twitter.com/xRD53WDpA9
It doesn’t feel nearly as rich in history as subways in those cities, alas – but once in a while you can find an old element, a bit of grime, or a long-gone detail that betrays its age and hints at stories.pic.twitter.com/DQ4lGVkJl6
It’s also has a rare building on the surface – and it’s pretty nice, too.pic.twitter.com/7oDBNRzpGL
But most important for me, at least, is the fact that it’s tiny. It’s “the oldest subway station in North America west of Chicago,” but it’s really just a straightforward, small subway station with two platforms.pic.twitter.com/HeKBVg1Rdd
That’s what I like about it. It’s an unremarkable station, far away from the splashy/touristy SF celebrations of transit history – cable cars and vintage streetcars – which also (oddly) don’t connect to it.pic.twitter.com/Qsjvgrt1N7
In a perfect world, there would be tons of tiny subway stations under San Francisco, serving us all. In that world, Forest Hill would not be distinctive enough to become a Designated Landmark.pic.twitter.com/ypGx5CC7Iv
In the actual world, we only have eight sad Muni Metro stations that are unremarkable in all the wrong ways. And so, sometimes, I travel to Forest Hill, and imagine what could’ve been.pic.twitter.com/kjRzanxGwC
More photos of Forest Hill/Muni Metro: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72157698370494280 … More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Hill_station_(Muni_Metro) …
(And note that San Francisco also has a parallel subway called BART with a few more stations that are actually *almost* brutalist-impressive – but BART covers the entire region, all started in the 1970s as well, and is kind of a whole different story.)
(Also, I got shouted at via the P.A. system for taking photos of Montgomery Station today… but the disembodied angry voice referred to me as “a young man,” so it actually made me feel better.)
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