← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Subway Sun and Your Subway Poster Memories
00:25:23
A new exhibition at the Transit Museum looks at the artists behind an enduring New York metro PSA, The Subway Sun.
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Jodi Shapiro
All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance.
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Alison Stewart
Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name youe Price Tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by.
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Jodi Shapiro
State law not available in all states. Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending some time with us this afternoon. We want to share some exciting news. You might have heard me talking about our February get lit with all of it book Club event. This month we'll be reading Imani Perry's new book, Black and How a Color Tells a Story of My People. We've also announced that for our musical guests, we'll be joined by by R and B, soul and jazz singer Bilal. But now we're excited to share the news that we have a second musical guest joining us, five time Grammy women's bassist, singer, songwriter and composer Esperanza Spalding. Her 18 day residency at the Blue Note begins tonight, kicking off a tour that will feature music from her most recent album 12 Little Spells and SongWrite's Apothecary Lab. She and Bilal will be creating some musical fusion together. We can't even begin to say how excited we are for this collaboration. So join me, Imani Perry Bilal, Esperanza Spalding at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on Wednesday, February 26th at 6pm Visit wnyc.org getlit for tickets and more information. Now let's get this hour started with the subway. The subway poster is part of the scenery of New York City. Whether you think about it or not, it's part of the ritual of your daily commute. How often have you spaced out in a subway ad or stared at a poster while trying to figure out what's it trying to sell me? And they have been a feature of New York Subway since as far back as 1904. In 1918, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company introduced a new series of posters called the Subway Sun. These posters feature Public Service Announcement Encourage civility, cleanliness and pride in your city and its transit system. It ran for five decades. A new exhibit at the Transit Museum explores the poster series and the two artists behind it, Fred G. Cooper and Amelia Updike Jones. Joining me now is its curator, Jodi Shapiro. Jodi, welcome back to the station.
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Jodi Shapiro
Thanks for having me back.
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Alison Stewart
Listeners, do you remember the Subway sun or its sister series, the Elevated Express? Do you have questions about those posters 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692. Or if you want to shout out a subway poster that stuck with you, any ads or PSAs that come to mind, call in and text us. 2124-3396-9221-2433-WNYC. You can join us on air or you can text that number as well. All right, let's lay the groundwork here. The IRT first introduced ADS in 1904. What kind of ads?
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Jodi Shapiro
They were mostly ads for public service. Things like, you know, to, to vote, to conserve fuel, those sorts of things. And that continues apace today. Products that you could buy at the time. If you come to the New York Transit Museum, you can see a selection of like weird soap ads, soup and you know, and this is the beginning of convenience for people. So there's a lot of canned goods, things that you can keep in your icebox and then later refrigerator and basically, you know, things to buy. It's not really that much of a social incubator at that time.
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Alison Stewart
Was there any sort of signage in the subways up until that point?
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Jodi Shapiro
Yeah. So one thing that has always been present in mass transit in any city, especially New York, is that advertising was kind of built in to the subway stations. There was a big fight about whether they should have spaces for ads on streetcars and elevated railways. There were always advertisements. So New Yorkers especially have always been exposed to ads whether they like it or not.
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Alison Stewart
The IRT was introduced. This IRT introduced the subway sun in 1918. What kind of information did they think the posters would initially cover in the initial years?
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Jodi Shapiro
So in the beginning of the campaign and it was a duel with the Elevated Express. So the Elevated Express ones were on the Elevated duh. And the Subway sun was in the underground conveyance. And basically it was mostly text based. There were some illustrators that were hired at the time, like Ernest Hamlin. Baker was somebody who was pretty present in the very early stages. And it is telling people service changes that are going to come up, schedule changes, places, some points of interest, like where the subway goes, where the elevateds go, and also some civic duty things and also, most importantly, telling people how their fare was being spent to improve the Interborough Rapid Transit's transit system.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting. I've heard of the Subway sun before. I haven't really heard of the Elevated Express.
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Jodi Shapiro
It's sort of like the forgotten child.
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Alison Stewart
Is it?
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Jodi Shapiro
Yeah, it is. Mostly because it's just I feel that the Subway Sun Examples of the actual posters are more findable because there was more of them. But in our exhibit, we get to show how some how both campaigns were made at the same time.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Jodi Shapiro, curator at the Transit Museum. We're talking about Shining a Light on the Subway, the art of Fredgy Cooper and Amelia Updike Jones. Do you remember the Subway Sun? Give us a call or text to us. 2124-3396-9221-2433, wnyc. Or maybe there's a poster you see on the subway now that stuck with you. Or any ads or PSAs that have become fond memories. 2124-3396-9221-2433, WNYC. So how often were these, these ads updated?
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Jodi Shapiro
About twice a month. It depended on. It depended on a lot of factors. The campaign it did, it started in 1918, and then during the war, they kind of curtailed production of it. And then they brought it back in 1946. So it was dormant for about four or five years. And so in the initial run before the pause, it was twice a month, sometimes three times a month. And then after it was unpaused, it was twice a month. And, you know, it's kind of interesting because that's a lot of posters to swap out.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah, it is.
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Jodi Shapiro
And you know, if anybody has ridden the subway lately, you know, or, you know, since time immemorial, since it's just there are some cars you get on and you see that the ads are for products that are for shows that have closed, things like that. So while I was putting together this exhibit, I was thinking, boy, the people who had to swap these posters out were totally on point because most of them have dates on them. This is the day that this parade is or take the Subway to be an American Day, which was a specific day every year, or voting, there's a couple of voting ones where these are the deadlines to register to vote. So you think that of all the people that have to keep on top of this, which they still do today in a different, bigger scale even, we.
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Alison Stewart
Got a text that says, I recall Ms. Subway posters.
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Jodi Shapiro
Yes. Not part of the Subway sun campaign, but yet another ad campaign that was pretty popular in the subway.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk about artist Fredgy Cooper. He took over as the Subway sun principal artist in the 1930s. Tell us more about Fred G. Cooper.
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Jodi Shapiro
So Fred is an interesting character. His pre Subway Son career, he was the art editor of Life magazine. He contributed from like 1904 into the middle of the 1930s. He was one of the founding members of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, which is the aiga. And he's also one of the first people, if not the first. This is something I need to find clarity on, is that he was the guy who basically created spot illustrations. So he would make these little illustrations that were for Life magazine that weren't really related to the story that they were illustrating with the idea of them being able to be reused. So clip art, basically.
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Alison Stewart
So it's interesting. How did the Subway Son change under his leadership? He had quite a resume.
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Jodi Shapiro
He did. You know, he was the person who made the poster series more of a coherent graphic statement instead of just having an illustration to highlight what the poster was talking about. He was the person who integrated the artwork and the messaging. And we have lots of examples of his artwork, original artwork, in the show and in the New York Transit Museum's collection, where you can kind of see him thinking out what the subject matter is going to be on paper and making, you know, little changes to the text. All of the text is hand lettered. He has a really interesting illustration style, which is very typical of a 1930s illustrator, with, like, bulbous heads and very round and not very angular. I am not an illustration or cartoonist expert. I'm just, you know, I'm a fan. So this is all just, you know, my observations. But his work is very 1930s looking. And people start to take notice of these posters and paying more attention to them, which is the idea behind the campaign is get more eyeballs on these messages. So, yeah, he does a pretty good job. And then during the time that he is at Life magazine, he's still overlapping with Life magazine a little bit. And someone walks into his office trying to sell him cartoons. And that someone is Amelia Opdyke Jones. And that is the beginning of this collaboration at first. And then she eventually takes over the campaign from him.
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Alison Stewart
I understand, though, that he had, like, little birds in his posters.
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Jodi Shapiro
So I don't know how many people actually noticed this. But artists of any kind, usually, besides just their actual written signature, have some kind of signature thing. Or they use a certain color or they use a symbol to be their signature. And Fred's seems to be these birds with question marks over their heads. They're present in so many of the posters. They're really fun to look for. And I just. Every time. Every time we would get a new piece of Fred's poster art or the finished poster, I'd be like, where's the bird? Where's the bird. So we have a little strip of in the exhibit to show people. And it's kind of fun to just tell people, hey, look for the bird with the question mark.
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Alison Stewart
We've got a text says the Phil D. Basket character to stop littering. One of his favorites.
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Jodi Shapiro
That was a sanitation department also, but present in the subway as well.
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Alison Stewart
This one says, I'm a collector and own about 10 of the subway sun posters.
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Jodi Shapiro
Nice.
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Alison Stewart
I love them. That's it. That's a good text. Let's talk to Sheila calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Sheila, thanks for calling, all of it. You're on the air.
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Sheila
Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to say that I really love the. I think they're called art cards. I think, like, these posters in the subway that were, like, long and thin and, like, they would show. They would depict riders in the subway in really whimsical ways. Like, I think there was one with the marine theme. There was one by the famous children's illustrator Sophie Blackball that showed, like this, you know, riders from the subway just acting, just, like, doing their thing. But they're, like, so quirky and wonderful, and they were, like, wonderful to stare at. I have to say, I haven't seen any recently, so I kind of miss them.
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Jodi Shapiro
They're still out there. When subway cars get redesigned and you've noticed that there's been some changes over the past, you know, 120 years, there's not always room for the specific art cards. It's my understanding that it's still an ongoing campaign from MTA Arts and Design. But, yeah, I like the art cards, too. They're really fun. They're a good example of bringing art to people in a really accessible way.
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Alison Stewart
I'm speaking to Jodi Shapiro, curator at the Transit Museum, about Shining a Light on the Subway, the art of Fredgy Cooper and Amelia Updike Jones. Hey, do you remember the Subway sun? Or is there an ad that really stays with you from the subway? 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC We'll Amelia now. Amelia Upfike Jones. When did she come in and start to run?
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Jodi Shapiro
She came in after the campaign was revived after the war. The people in charge of the Subway sun asked Fred Cooper to come back. And he said, I'm a little busy with my own thing, but Amelia is great, and I think she would do a great job of this campaign. And she had already been assisting him when he was doing the Subway sun. During his tenure, she assisted him she. She helped compose some of the posters. She did some of the drawing. As I look at the work more and more, I see her creeping in a little bit. And when she starts, when she takes over the campaign, you can definitely see Fred's influence on her work. And then she grows into her own thing. You know, she started out, she went to Life magazine and tried to sell her cartoons to Fred. And he made a quip saying that he would either have to buy something from her or marry her to get her to go away. Oh, boy. In an affectionate way. And he became her mentor. You know, she had a career even before the Subway Sun. She was a cartoonist. She had her. A syndicated comic strip called the Young Idear with an R after idea. And it was round headed, precocious children, much like Peanuts. People have said that Peanuts kind of stole it from her. I can't really comment on that because I'm not a comics historian. Someone out there, maybe one of my friends who are listening, who. Who are comics historians, can speak about that at some point. But in. In her comic strip, you know, it's very 1930s round, not very angular. And then she starts doing the Subway sun. And her work really. I feel her work really matures in this medium. And she's got all these techniques to make the faces expressive. And, you know, you look at her original artwork that we have at the museum, and it's gouache on board. Gouache is a watercolor that is opaque and not translucent. And there's not a lot of underdrawing on these. And so you could see that she did a lot of these faces freehand. So there's a lot of skill there. What's really cool is that she called herself Oppie because she wanted to hide the fact that she was a woman.
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Alison Stewart
I was gonna ask, you know, a woman in charge at this time, a.
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Jodi Shapiro
Woman cartoonist at this time is something that's really not the norm. And it was something that she didn't really think about in terms of, like, I'm a woman and I shouldn't be doing this. It's more like, I really like doing this. And some people might think it's weird that I am a woman. So, you know, so she code switched. Basically, she calls herself Oppie. And, you know, hilarity ensues because once the Subway sun campaign starts picking up steam and people start paying much more attention to it, there are these letters that come into the board of transportation saying this Oppy is encouraging women to hit men over the head with a purse and, you know, you've got to tell this guy to, you know, slow his roll, you know, however they said it in the 40s, and. And the board of Transportation says, well, we've got a surprise for you. Oppie is a woman. She gets outed as a woman in some New York Times article, or maybe it was the Brooklyn Eagle, where it was like, you know, imagine this writer surprised to find out that Oppie is a woman. And it's just kind of like, okay, yes, she is.
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Alison Stewart
You're right.
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Jodi Shapiro
She's a woman. And she's really good at this. And she's got this knack for encouraging people to behave the way that everybody should behave, but doesn't always.
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Alison Stewart
This says, bring back subway poetry. Loved reading that. As I commuted, another text says, I used to see posters for an event called the New York City Busker Ball, a celebration of the subway musician. The musicians looked like a legit campaign. Even had the New York City brand on it. I soon learned on Reddit it was a guerrilla campaign. They look so authentic, however, even though they were never removed. That's kind of interesting. Let's talk to Carolina, Carolita, I hope, in Queens. Hi. This is all of it. Are you there?
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Sheila
Hi. Yes. Yes, it is. Carolita. My. My most vivid and strong memory of a subway poster in the subway was from the Poetry in Motion series. I saw Westren Wind and never forgot it. Like a 16th century poem. It was just beautiful. Do you want me to tell you it's very short?
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Alison Stewart
Oh, sure, go for it.
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Sheila
Yeah, it's Westren Wind. When will thou blow the small rain down can rain. Christ. If my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. Isn't that beautiful?
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Alison Stewart
Oh, thank you, Carolina. We really appreciate your call. My guest is Jodi Shapiro, curator at the Transit Museum. We're talking about Shining a Light on the Subway sun, the Art of Fredgy Cooper and Amelia Updike Jones. I have a question about Ms. Jones. Did she truly come up with the phrase litterbug?
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Jodi Shapiro
So she's credited with coming up with litterbug. I have spent more years than I am willing to admit to be able to definitively say. That's why we kind of hedge it. We're like, she is credited with it, as far as I can tell. As far as the research has told us that she is the first person to use it in an ad campaign. And it's a take on the jitterbug, which is a dance that was very popular in the 40s. And she also tried to coin, well, she did coin gumbug, but it didn't really stick as well as litterbug does. You know, everyone knows what litterbug means. Nobody really thinks about gumbug.
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Alison Stewart
What a gumbug refer to, like getting gum in her shoe.
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Jodi Shapiro
A person who would throw gum on the floor or stick it places where it did not belong.
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Alison Stewart
What about Father Knickerbocker?
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Jodi Shapiro
Father Knickerbocker. I love talking about Father Knickerbocker because it's just ridiculous. We have Washington Irving to blame for Father Knickerbocker, the satirical novel that he wrote about, you know, a Real History of New York and, you know, by Diedrich Knickerbocker. The Knickerbockers were an actual old money Dutch family here in New York State, but Diedrich Knickerbocker was not one of them. He was a fiction. Father Knickerbocker is a symbol of everything that, quote unquote, old New York was supposed to have been kind of like how people idealize what the United States was like in the 50s as this, you know, this ideal plane of existence. Father Knickerbocker was the ideal old New Yorker, even though that old New York probably never existed. But it was a shorthand. So Father Knickerbocker shows up in a lot of. A lot of New York centric advertising of the time in the 1940s and even into the 50s. And Oppie, since she was actually herself descended from the Opdyke family, which was one of these old New York Dutch families, I think the irony was not lost on her to use Father Knickerbocker to symbolize something like civic pride and being a good citizen and doing everything that you're old money Dutch ancestors would have done. And he's fun. She, you know, he. Sometimes he's a doctor. Most of the time he's Father Nick. Sometimes he's pushing a broom and cleaning up New York City. Sometimes as a doctor, he is telling people to get themselves checked for venereal diseases, which is one of my favorite applications of Father Knickerbocker. And, you know, he's just. He's just a mascot for New York writ large.
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Alison Stewart
These subway ads, the Subway sun, promoted things like Horn and Hardart, places to eat, who decided what got promoted and who paid.
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Jodi Shapiro
So that's something that is not entirely clear to us. The courtesy and the courtesy things and the touristy type of things like go visit the Statue of Liberty and that sort of thing. That was all in house. I suspect that you mentioned horn and hard Art. We have original art for four or five of those posters that Fred did. I have never seen examples of the printed pieces as completed, which doesn't mean that they didn't get completed. It just means that I haven't seen them in my research. They may exist out there somewhere. Maybe one of your listeners has them, I suspect because it's talking about the things that they're selling in their stores and they have a new logo that perhaps that was some kind of paid announcement for them. But, you know, as, as with most of even the current MTA internal house courtesy campaigns, it's, it's all internal. It's not paid for by extra, extraneous people. So my, your guess is as good as mine.
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Alison Stewart
When and why did the Subway sun end?
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Jodi Shapiro
Just because it did. You know, Amelia didn't want to do it anymore. She wanted to retire. The society changed, you know, even though bad behavior never ends. I guess that, you know, during, during the 60s, it was a new, new style of talking to people through ads. Design was changing. Maybe people felt it was too quaint. I think it was just a confluence of different things. What's kind of ironic is that the current ad campaigns for courtesy are talking about the same things that the Subway sun and Elevated Express were talking about back in the teens.
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Alison Stewart
It's funny because there is one poster from 1951 and the caption reads, trains can't wait because you're late. Please do not squeeze through the closing doors. There's another one that, that discourages crossing your legs. The equivalent of man spreading. Yeah, it's so funny. Look at these from like 50, 75 years ago. What has changed and what hasn't changed about subway etiquette? We're going to talk about it for the next 20 minutes with Josh Gonneman. What do you think hasn't changed?
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Jodi Shapiro
Lots of it hasn't changed. People still spit, which is disgusting. People still try to squeeze into seats that they won't fit in. People block the doors. That's, that's maybe my number one pet peeve is blocking the doors. It's very easy to stand aside and let people get off. There's. The train's not gonna leave without you. It's fine. Yeah, it's, it's kind of astounding when you look at these as a whole, how little has changed in terms of people's behavior. And it's, it's chilling in a way. And it's also just kind of like thinking about all of these health related posters telling you to cover your mouth. When you sneeze. And that has improved quite dramatically. Even even before COVID I think there were less instances of people like openly just sneezing and not covering up. Sorry to get graphic.
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Alison Stewart
Is there anything that you bring it back to something positive? One thing you would like people to notice when they go to this exhibit, Spend five more minutes in front of what?
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Jodi Shapiro
Oh, wow. I just think spending time looking at the original artwork to see the annotations that are there from both Fred and Amelia are kind of enlightening, which is why the exhibit is formatted the way that it is. Because a lot of people just think an ad or is just it springs fully formed out of the mind of the person who's making it. And this shows some of the process about language. You know, what's more effective, what actually fits in the space that we have, what colors to use, expressions on people's faces in the drawings. So I would like people to spend some time with that.
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Alison Stewart
The name of the exhibit is Shining a Light on the Subway the Art of Fred G. Cooper and Amelia Updike Jones. Jodi Shapiro is a curator at the Transit Museum. Thanks for coming by, Jody.
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Jodi Shapiro
Thanks for having me.
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Alison Stewart
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first, first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.