The Hidden Meanings Behind NYC’s Colored Subway Globes
On your everyday commute you probably don’t take much notice of the colorful globes atop NYC’s street level subway stations, but at one point, they helped commuters like you determine which entrances they could enter and which they could not.
The colored globes were first introduced across the system in the early 1980s. Each color was used to indicate if a subway entrance was open and whether or not it had a manned booth. According to the New York Transit Museum, these are what each globe color indicated:
Green 
– 24-hour ticket booth
Yellow 
– part-time booth
Red 
– entrance limited or it’s only an exit
To better understand the ticketing booths of that time, there would be an MTA employee inside the subway booth who would exchange riders cash for a subway token. Keep in mind, subway fare has a long history and evolutionary timeline. If you’re interested, you can learn all about it and how it went from tokens to taps here.
Eventually the yellow globes were discontinued in order to simplify the system. And as the NYC subway continued to make improvements throughout the years and introduce the MetroCard along with High Entrance and Exit Turnstiles, the red globe exit indicators became futile.
Two-tone globes then replaced the solid color globes to now give riders additional light on the stairway entrances. So though the age of subway globe indicators is technically behind us, they’re a wonderful relic of our transit history that still stands at many street level entrances today.
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