Thursday, May 3, 2012

Did they change the colors in BART stations or am I going completely insane?

You guys, I think they changed the colors in the downtown SF BART stations at some point and no one is talking about it.

Either (1) I'm the only one who noticed or (2) I have begun my slow descent into madness.

Back up a little. Since I moved to the Inner Richmond (REPRESENT!) I don't ride BART as much as I used to. So last night I was traveling from meeting up with one group of friends at Bocadillos on Montgomery (pretty good, expensive, overrated?) to meeting up with The Wife and another friend at Mosto in the Mission (crowded, loud, very crowded) and I rode BART for the first time in a while.

So I notice, the color of the stripe along the top of Montgomery Street Station is now PURPLE. It used to be BLUE, didn't it?

Oh shit, check out this picture, dated "December 29, 2010," by Flickr user "CT Young":


That is unmistakably purple, right? Or am I fucking colorblind? And didn't that stripe use to be dark blue? I am freaking out.

Check this out, from Flickr user "geena!" What color is this:


That's orange, right? Didn't Powell use to be red? WTF is going on?

(BTW, if you search for BART stations on Flickr, you get a lot - a LOT - of photos of buskers, FYI. Buskers are beloved by amateur photogs.)

Now that I look through all these photos, Powell is uniformly orange in every one. How could I have not noticed this in the past 20 years? This is like a Twilight Zone episode where everything is skewed just very slightly, almost too slight to notice, but enough to throw you off completely.

COMPLETELY UNRELATED, but while searching for pictures for this post, I came across this photo entitled Typhoon Party on Okinawa July 1970 and it is one of the single most awesome pictures I have ever seen. Read the whole story accompanying it too.

3 comments:

hez said...

yes. within the last 6-8 months. you're not going crazy.

Tamagosan said...

What colors? There are no colors. Please come with us, sir. Let's talk to the man in the white coat.

This same thing happens to me every time I take MUNI with the voices. Since I try to avoid it at all costs (successfully, between the bike and living close to a BART station, inch'allah), it seems they're always adding in some new pointless announcement in a new weird voice.

I would call the "new" color burgundy. (Side note: The French call this color "Bordeaux", cementing the snobby reputation of people from Bordeaux.)

Can't wait to read the Okinawa story. It will be a welcome change from my usual diet of anti-colonial news. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Civic Center said...

Love the Okinawa photo, and am embarrassed I haven't noticed the Muni Metro station color changes. Thanks for the update or I probably would have had an "am I too stoned and/or old to be out in public" moment when I noticed the change myself.