Is there a way to achieve equivalent settings to the subplots grid adjustments but using the individual subplot API's?
In particular the subplots may be adjusted via the GridSpec:
gs = gridspec.GridSpec(4, 1, height_ratios=[2, 2, 1, 1]) 
The subplots may also be adjusted via gridspec_kw:  
gridspec_kw={'wspace':0,'hspace':0})
Or even:
fig.subplots_adjust(wspace=2)
However I was not able to find a similar capability directly on the subplot api - e.g. following is not valid:
plt.subplot(2, 2, 1, gridspec_kw={'wspace':0,'hspace':0})
The rationale for finding this is I am working with pre-existing code that only uses subplot.  It would be a meaningful effort to convert the code to subplots and so a direct addition of just the grid capability would be preferred if possible.