MTA Accused of Being Trendy

The MTA has chosen teal or robin’s egg blue (or is it more of a turquoise? Discuss) as the color of the Second Avenue subway line, which will be called the T. On a conceptual level, teal makes a lot of sense for the line that will serve the Upper East Side, given its resemblance to Tiffany box blue. It also turns out that teal is quite trendy right now, according to a fashion analytics company. But it’s hard to decorate with, reports the Times:

That is good news for a color that designers say is not easy to work with. Marjorie Hilton, an interior designer with a large Upper East Side clientele, said that certain clients had driven her crazy when they asked for a room to be decorated in robin’s egg blue, because “every single fabric house at the D&D Building has a different interpretation of the color; it ranges from a pale light blue to a pale aqua to Tiffany box.”

White people problems! The thrust of this article is that the Upper East Side is mostly decorated in beige, and that some might consider the trendy teal/turquoise of the subway too gauche for the neighborhood. The UES is timeless, after all. Emphasis ours:

John Barman, a prominent designer on the Upper East Side, echoed Ms. Hilton’s concerns about having a turquoise train line in beige territory. He hopes the city never pairs the turquoise T line with its orange lines, because that would produce a garish Howard Johnson effect.

“It’s more of a Florida color,” he said delicately.

None of this is exactly news per se, since according to MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz, “it’s been a while” since the choice was made. “It’s probably been since before construction started,” he told Runnin’ Scared, meaning that teal has been the color of the T line since at least 2007.

Ortiz also explained that the color had previously been used for the JFK Express line, and that “This was the easiest approach for picking a color since it was used in the past.” Buy your T shirt (ha) — hopefully it won’t be too threadbare by the time Phase One of construction is supposed to be finished in 2016.