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Gowanus Subway Station Finally Has Cardboard Tile Replaced With Real Mosaic

By Leslie Albrecht | July 31, 2015 7:33am | Updated on August 2, 2015 9:00pm
 A shot of the Smith-Ninth St. subway station sign in 2013, just before MTA unveiled the refurbished station. This version of the sign looked like tile from afar but was made of cardboard. Real tile signs recently returned to the station, Forgotten New York reported.
A shot of the Smith-Ninth St. subway station sign in 2013, just before MTA unveiled the refurbished station. This version of the sign looked like tile from afar but was made of cardboard. Real tile signs recently returned to the station, Forgotten New York reported.
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Flickr/MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann

It's been a while, but the Smith-Ninth Street subway station finally got its tile back.

The fake cardboard station signs that were installed when the newly renovated Gowanus station opened in April 2013 have finally been replaced with genuine tile mosaics, Forgotten New York reported Thursday.

“[T]he artisans have come through and produced brand new versions of the mosaic tiles, which are faithful restorations of the former ones,” Forgotten New York wrote.

The temporary paper signs were a disappointment to straphangers, especially because the MTA spent more than $40 million overhauling the station for nearly two years.

The MTA vowed to return the real tile back in 2013, but the work still hadn't been completed more than a year after the station's reopening.

An MTA spokesman confirmed Thursday that the authentic tile mosaic had indeed returned to the station.

Apparently the fake tile didn't look too different from its real counterpart.

The real mosaics replaced the cardboard versions back in November, the spokesman said, but no one seems to have noticed the switch until now.