ON OCTOBER 27, 1904, a single subway train left the City Hall station, traveled up the east side of Manhattan to Grand Central, west across 42nd Street to Times Square, and north up the west side into what was still the countryside of the Bronx. With that, the New York City subway system was born. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of that maiden voyage, Subway Style-produced by the New York Transit Museum-is an illustrated history of the architecture and design of the entire system from its inception to today. From the very beginning, the New York subway's creators never thought of the project solely as a means of transportation. Conceived in the 1890s and brought to fruition at the height of the newly fashionable City Beautiful movement, the subway was viewed as a major urban design program. Fittingly, the subway's chief engineer, William Barclay Parsons, supervised the system's construction, but also brought in outside architectural talent: Heins and LaFarge, designers of the cathedral of St. John the Divine and the Bronx Zoo, and the legendary Stanford White, master of European-style classicism. This attention to and respect for a functional yet beautiful subway system continued throughout the twentieth century, leading the evolution of subway design to mirror the world of art and architecture as these struggled between traditional European models and more modernist expression of industrial technology.

From maps to mosaics, benches to bridges, Subway Style takes the reader on a visual journey of the development and evolution of the New York City subway system all the way to the present day. Filled with exclusive photographs commissioned by the New York Transit Museum, as well as archive material from the museum's rich collection, Subway Style's lush photographic history celebrates one hundred years of art, architecture, and transportation in the New York City subway system.