Large enough to make it clear from the inside of a train arriving in a station. In some cases the historical signage is the only prominent thing you see out of the window of a given car. (Scollay Under, for example -- they are cool, big signs that used to be the primary wayfinding.)
They should just rename Govt Center to "Government Center/Scollay" or something like that
Disagree. It's the urban renewal projects—reflected in the generic name of "Govt Center"—that are now equally, if not even more anachronistic to the zeitgeist. While I do agree with a part of the principle underlying your argument, which is that romanticized resurrections are to be avoided, that does not mean that any specific historical decision need always be set in stone, or that sometimes, bringing a former name back to life cannot be appropriate. The urban fabric, including names of places, is a living thing that is always being continuously updated. Thinking about it even as I write, I think perhaps one of the biggest barriers to ever actually doing anything about the ghastly nightmare of city hall plaza is the name, "City Hall Plaza", alongside the overall name, "Government Center". A more Bostonian name might actually breathe some idea-level life and provide better guidance and impetus to better humanize this area.
I will say, having despaired of trying to fit two of the T’s longest station names (Government Center, Downtown Crossing) into the core of the map, alongside two of its shortest station names (State, Park [{St}reet]), I myself would be quite alright with the name being changed to City Hall. (Which someone did on a recent fantasy map, I think.)
On the topic of reverting name changes, I think I'd switch Kendall/MIT and JFK/UMass back to Kendall and Columbia. Charles/MGH I could go either way on.
It was just "Charles". (Although named for Charles Circle.) The same way that the "Sq" in Kendall, Central, Harvard and Andrew was implied, not signed. Same thing with Columbia, it wasn't "Columbia Rd", just Columbia.
Agreed. (Hence the "I could go either way" thing). The MIT in Kendall seems undeserved should you ever have the pleasure of needing to walk from the station to where most of MIT is, it's often 15+ minutes away. JFK/UMass is worse. The idea that the station somehow serves the Library (or UMass) is laughable, it's more than a mile away. The fact that the 8 to Columbia Point is being made a High-Frequency route feels like a pretty direct admission of this. By that logic you may as well call Roxbury Crossing "Harvard Medical School".
...an urban ring or GLX on the Grand Junction would solve the problem, since then we'd have a proper MIT station!
Nothing wrong with calling MGH "Mass General", in the same way that there's nothing wrong with
