The crowds of people, the smell of urine, and the ambiance of urgency makes the subway station a quite horrid place for people to spend hours in. However, this bacterial infested place is a haven for many things that make New York a culturally and artistically diverse city. I live in Bay Ridge, the southwest corner of Brooklyn, which ultimately consists of a large bracket of universally different streets and avenues that eventually lead up to the Verrazano Bridge. There are four subway stations that run through this area, and like most subway stations, a little extra upkeep and maintenance is necessary. Nonetheless, in the station nearest to me, 86th Street, there is a beautiful piece of artwork that is overlooked by many passengers. People rush and fly past it, and I, myself, can admit to not looking clearly at it throughout the years that I have been commuting.
The person behind the project, Amy Bennett, is a Brooklyn artist who worked on this large-scale mosaic mural for the MTA’s Arts in NYC project during 2011. This mural takes up one complete wall of the station’s mezzanine. According to her website, Bennett specializes in creating small-scale models such as neighborhoods, lakes, churches, and other community buildings. This is quite contradictory because the artwork in the station is not a small sculpture or model, but an enormous glass mosaic called “Heydays.”
“Heydays” is a mosaic of four different houses, a small portion of a community perhaps. These houses do not look modern or twenty-first century-esque in any way. In fact, they look like constructions of Bay Ridge’s past. The large balconies and the romantically designed doors are characteristic of the summer homes that used to line the shore of Bay Ridge. The skyline is empty, with no phone lines or tall buildings, except for the many trees and grass that surround these houses. The buildings, when viewed left to right, decrease in size. The house furthermost left is a red brick building large enough to comfortably fit more than two families. The house in the middle is a beautiful paneled house with a brick roof. It looks like there is a large attic space up there. There is even a white fence surrounding the roof alone. The second to last house is smaller than the other two. There is a large field of grass, that separates these three houses from the rest of the mosaic which consists of one last house, a very miniscule house compared to the other three.
The square mosaic tiles are not placed completely horizontal or vertical. They differ in size and are placed to fit the shape of the object that is being portrayed, each glass tile fitted in a different direction. The coloring is very realistic. What needs to be vibrant is vibrant and what is realistically dull is painted dull. The palette used is composed of reds, whites, blues, and greens.
A heyday, according to the dictionary, is “the period of a person’s or thing’s greatest success, popularity, or vigor.” This sheds a whole new light on the mosaic. Bennett is perhaps portraying these houses as trophies of success. After all, the American Dream does include a white-picket fence that surrounds a nice family-size house. Perhaps she differs the sizes of these houses to depict the varying levels of success that exist, as if the person who owns the larger house is more successful than the person who owns the house that follows and so on. I also believe that she is portraying the history of Bay Ridge as the houses she created do not belong in today’s Bay Ridge. In a way, she is celebrating the history of this community in its most visited subway station.
When I first looked at the mosaic mural to analyze its artistic meaning, I was shocked by the sheer size of it. The mural runs from the bottom of the wall to the top, not leaving any empty space. What I also noticed was that the community and estates that she depicts are very rural-like which is a tribute to Bay Ridge’s past, and I think this mural is definitely meant to last for this purpose. The piece looks like some deep thinking and went into structuring it, and to me, as a Bay Ridge resident for my whole life, it felt like a portal to the past of my home.
