The New York Transit Museum’s gallery annex at Grand Central Terminal is host to the exhibit “Architects of the New York City Subway Part 1: Heins & La-Farge and the Tradition of Great Public Work.” The museum will follow this with a second part, “Squire Vickers and the Subway’s Modern Age,” between July 30 and October 28.

Heins & La Farge (it’s customary to spell the name with a space between “La” and “Farge,” which the museum does not do) created the original visual identity of the city’s earliest subway system, that of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Between 1901 and 1908 Heins & La Farge designed underground and elevated stations, entry kiosks, and control houses. Much of what most delights us in the system came from this firm. Examples of its handiwork with which most New Yorkers are familiar include the subway entrance at Broadway and 72nd Street (1904), the subway kiosk at Flatbush and Atlantic avenues in Brooklyn (1908), the lovely Borough Hall station at Joralemon and Court streets in Brooklyn (1908), and the Astor Place station of 1904, with its beaver plaques produced by the Grueby Faience Co. The most legendary of the city’s subway stations, the original I.R.T. City Hall station of 1904, closed since 1945, was one of the most beautiful transit stations in the world, which is hard to believe about a system that strikes most people as overall the ugliest in the world.

But it was not always ugly, nor is it now ugly in all its parts. Whenever the city has mustered the wherewithal to restore a Heins & La Farge station, its beauty returns. And some of their stations, even after more than a century of deferred maintenance, can still charm.

The Transit Museum exhibit shows that the I.R.T. took pride in its appearance. When the company hired Heins & La Farge, the architects had a few years earlier won worldwide renown for their victory in the competition to design the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. The exhibit contains material related to the cathedral, as well as to the firm’s design of the original six buildings (1899–1910) of the Bronx Zoo, so as to relate the subway designs to the firm’s larger body of work. George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant La Farge designed a vigorous Romanesque cathedral for Morningside Heights. In 1911, however, four years after Heins’s death at 47, control of the cathedral’s architecture was wrested from the firm by the overeager Gothic proselytizer Ralph Adams Cram, who chose altogether to scuttle Heins & La Farge’s Romanesque design for a Gothic redesign that has directed the construction of the still uncompleted cathedral ever since. Still, the imposing crossing space within the cathedral remains Heins & La Farge’s work.

At the time of the I.R.T. work, Heins held the position of New York State Architect, appointed by Governor Theodore Roosevelt. La Farge, son of the painter John La Farge and father of the novelist Oliver La Farge, had worked in Boston for Henry Hobson Richardson. Neither Heins or La Farge attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and neither was wedded to a classical style.

Rather, the firm had a romantic streak, and the I.R.T. stations and entrances are nothing if not romantic. While the focus of the compact exhibit (in an even more compact, indeed downright cramped, space) is on Heins & La Farge, there is also a nice minor emphasis on the ceramic firms that supplied the architects’ stations. Works by Grueby Faience of Boston shown here include the wonderful eagle and shield (1904) from the old 33rd Street station of the East Side line, the acanthus leaf (1904) from the 116th Street and Broadway station, and a lovely plaque from the 110th Street station on the Broadway line — the station nearest the cathedral. A plaque from the 50th Street station on the East Side shows off Grueby’s patented matte green glaze that helped identify these early stations.

The Atlantic Terra Cotta Co. produced such works shown here as the City College plaque from the 137th Street station, and a plaque from the Worth Street station.

Architectural elements on display at the museum exhibit include an awesome bronze chandelier from the fabled City Hall station, a 1904 bronze grille from a ticket booth (when was the last time bronze was used in any subway construction?), a bold steel airvent cover that, though it was made sometime between 1904 and 1908, looks like art deco, and a 1904 cast-iron lamppost from an el station. Not least, the exhibit is rich in Heins & La Farge drawings, such as a lovely ink on linen, from 1905, of the control house (still standing) of the Bowling Green station.

The Transit Museum exhibit packs in a lot of nicely chosen objects, and could scarcely do better to introduce the gallery visitor to Heins & La Farge. Would only that it were in a worthier, less cramped space.

Until July 8 (Grand Central Terminal, 42nd Street and Park Avenue, in the Shuttle Passage near the Station Master’s office, 212-878-0106).