Washington Metro: Great Society Subway with Zachary Schrag

The Washington Metro is more than just a transit system; it’s a statement about government’s role in public life. We chat with Professor Zachary Schrag about the Washington Metro’s history, its stunning brutalist design, and the larger ideals it represents.

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Show notes & links

• Find Zachary Schrag at his website, Bluesky and Twitter
• Wikipedia walk: Washington Metro, Harry Weese, Lance Wyman, WMATA Image Gallery
• Past Episodes worthwhile to listen to: Every Map a Poem with Peter Lloyd

Episode Takeaways

1. Metro Design Philosophy: The Washington Metro was designed with a sense of dignity, inspired by federal ideals of public architecture, aiming to create a system that would convey stability, enterprise, and aesthetic appeal for the nation’s capital.
2. Resistance to Urban Highways: Unlike many cities that prioritized highways, early residents and leaders in D.C. opposed highways cutting through neighborhoods, advocating instead for a public transit system.
3. Metro’s Hybrid Nature: The Metro serves both urban and suburban needs. Stations are spaced closely in the city core, similar to traditional subway systems, but spread out with parking options in the suburbs, making it a blend of urban subway and commuter rail.
4. Architectural Consistency: Architect Harry Weese’s design, including vaulted ceilings and indirect lighting, brought a cohesive, modernist aesthetic to all Metro stations, distinguishing it from other transit systems with patchwork designs.
5. Brutalist Influence: The Metro stations feature brutalist elements, with raw, exposed concrete and minimalistic design choices intended to showcase structural integrity and avoid excessive decoration.
6. Evolution Through Preservation: Metro’s design has had to adapt to changes like accessibility improvements and safety features over time. Recently, more attention has been paid to preserving the historical aesthetic, like the lighting revamp by Claude Engel to restore original lighting intentions.
7. Indirect Lighting: Lighting designer William Lamb’s use of indirect lighting created a unique ambiance, washing station ceilings with light to mimic a sky-like feeling, enhancing spatial comfort.
8. Iconic Map Design: The Metro map, created by Lance Wyman, became iconic for its clear, modernist design, though it became cluttered over time. Wyman was brought back to simplify it during the Dulles Corridor extension.
9. Practical Aesthetic Choices: Practicality was balanced with beauty; for example, granite platform edges provided both contrast for safety and embedded lighting to alert riders to approaching trains.
10. The Metro as a Symbol of Governance: Schrag’s concept of the “Great Society Subway” connects Metro to the ideals of government-led civic projects, representing what government can achieve in creating shared, public-oriented infrastructure.

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Guest Bio

Zachary M. Schrag [silent c, rhymes with bag and flag] studies cities, technology, and public policy in the United States in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

He is the author of four books: The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro; Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009; The Princeton Guide to Historical Research; and The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation.

“If this is going to be a subway for the federal city. It should look great. The station design for Metro has a couple of origins. One is the more idealistic sense of confidence in federal government confidence in the public realm that was expressed by the Kennedy administration in the famous guiding principles for federal architecture drafted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan that called on federal buildings, especially those in Washington to provide visual testimony to the dignity enterprise vigor and stability of the American government.”

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Episode Transcript

Intro: Vintage Metro Ad

[00:00:00]

WMATA: Okay, dad is driving to work now oh no, traffic jam. Looks like, he’s gonna be late. My dad is going to beat the traffic with super car. My daddy’s going to be early. My daddy’s going to be first, too, with super car. There’s no such thing as super car. Ride Metro. It’s the only way to beat the traffic.

Zachary Schrag: The station design for Metro has a couple of origins. One is the more idealistic sense of confidence in federal government confidence in the public realm that was expressed by the Kennedy administration in the famous guiding principles for federal architecture drafted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan that called on federal buildings, especially those in Washington to provide visual testimony to the dignity enterprise vigor and stability of the American government.

Intro

Journey With Purpose: [00:01:00] Welcome to journey with purpose episode 30. This is your host, Randy Plemel. This is the great society subway episode. We had an election last week and it did not go the way I would prefer. And it is going to have a lot of impact on all of our lives. But instead of wallowing in that day and week in the future, and instead of storming the Capitol building, we’re going to talk about how government is good. The era of big government never left the Washington Metro. Designed as one of the three mid century heavy rail systems, which included Marta in Atlanta. And Bart in the bay area. Metro rail, which was built as perhaps the most beautiful subway systems in America. And this is coming from a new Yorker.

We have a few episodes about Metro rail WMATA and how it has [00:02:00] been growing and expanding. And this is the first episode. And this will give us some context of the system. What was happening that created it. And we get to speak with professor and author Zachary Schrag who has written the excellent book, the great society subway.

What experiment we’ll be doing on this episode is that when you hear this sound.

And check your screen as we change the image. So you can see what we’re speaking about. This may or may not be annoying and we might not do this in the future, but we’re going to try today. Okay, on, with our conversation. Professor Schrag welcome to journey with purpose. Can you take us back in time when Metro was created and give us an idea of what was happening in the region and in America.

Metrorail Context

Zachary Schrag: In the 1950s, a lot of Americans believed that the solution to growing urbanism was to build as many highways as possible to enable people to live in [00:03:00] the suburbs and to drive alone downtown. And this was encoded In the Federal Highway Act of 1956, that, although it substantively funded an interstate highway program, a lot of that money was destined for urban freeways.

This became reality in most American cities. If you go to just about any American city and try to walk from one end to another, you will be interrupted by a major freeway, and that makes the experience Much less pleasant. You’ll also be interrupted by a great deal of parking, whether it is big surface parking lots or structured parking garages.

A lot of American cities were given up to the automobile in the 1950s and subsequent decades. Washington was different very early on in the 1950s. People in some of the residential neighborhoods protested. They said, we don’t want these highways coming through our neighborhoods. We don’t want our city carved up.

Metrorail Alternative

Zachary Schrag: And they proposed an alternative, which would be [00:04:00] a very extensive rapid transit system. They got people in power, both in the executive branch and allies in Congress. And eventu