Win, Lose, Draw: The Great Subway Map Wars

location based services

ONE day not long ago, in a sunlit apartment on the Upper West Side, John Tauranac could be found examining a large, taped-together draft of a subway map.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge this Image

A 1930’s map, when most of the els were still in service.

Mr. Tauranac, a 66-year-old New Yorker with mussed gray-black hair and gold-rimmed glasses, used to design maps for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, until he was, as he put it, “declared redundant” in 1987.

The draft on his coffee table, published in June, differed from the M.T.A.’s current map in obvious ways. It had separate pages for daytime and late-night service, and stops were marked with tiny box-enclosed letters that interrupted the line. Like Mr. Tauranac himself, it was chatty: in the bottom left-hand corner was a well-written little guide to the subway system that began, “The coin of the realm is the MetroCard.”

The map also did something that present-day New Yorkers take for granted. It picked out parks and islands, labeled airports, and identified neighborhoods in blue type. In other words, it showed many features of aboveground New York — just as the M.T.A. map does, with its faint street grid, its bridges, train tracks and cemeteries.

Mr. Tauranac’s latest effort is also a potent reminder that one of the stormiest battles involving New York’s self-image involved neither development nor political leadership, but what would seem the most mundane of issues: the look of the city’s subway map.

Mr. Tauranac’s map may seem normal to New Yorkers today. But it is hardly the only way for a subway map to look, or even the typical way. Most of the world’s subway maps are essentially diagrams: they depict subway routes as straight lines with right-angle turns, rather than curving channels tunneled through bedrock. Following London’s map of 1933, a classic in the field, most make use of a featureless white background, lacking any hint of the city’s geography. The assumption is that riders will know what station is near their destination, or at least figure it out.

New York has long been an exception to this rule. The city’s brightly colored 1948 map, for example, indicates even relatively small parks and outlines the promontories and jagged inlets of the East River waterfront in the Bronx. It tries to show the physical contortions of the subway lines, the way they wobble, zigzag and belly inward or out as the land dictates. Even the drab, oatmeal-colored map of the late 50’s preserved the boroughs’ outlines and the river’s curves.

Then a tall, fierce-browed Italian graphic designer named Massimo Vignelli entered the picture. In 1972, Mr. Vignelli designed a completely new schematic map for the M.T.A., one that showed New York’s subway routes as rich, contrasting stripes of color, marching in lock step across a white background, and turning only at 45- or 90-degree angles. In contrast to the brilliance of the subway routes, aboveground New York was almost invisible: the outlines of the boroughs were stubby and squared-off; the parks were gray boxes; and the water was tan.

The map defiantly ignored the city’s geography: the Broadway line was shown crossing the Eighth Avenue line at 42nd Street (they actually cross at Columbus Circle); Bowling Green appeared above Rector Street (it’s below); and Central Park was a small square rather than a tall rectangle.

“Of course I know Central Park is rectangular and not square,” Mr. Vignelli said the other day, sitting at a green marble table in his studio on East 67th Street. “Of course I know the park is green, and not gray. Who cares? You want to go from Point A to Point B, period. The only thing you are interested in is the spaghetti.”

As it turned out, New Yorkers were interested in more than the spaghetti. Almost as soon as Mr. Vignelli’s map arrived at stations, people started complaining about its failure to describe the city’s geography. Tourists were getting off the subway at the bottom of Central Park and trying to stroll to the top, for example, expecting a 30-minute walk.

Mr. Tauranac, who at the time was writing guide books for the M.T.A., criticized the Vignelli map for throwing out what he called the “cartographic verities.” “You can go to any kid in grammar school and ask, ‘What color is water?’ ” In falsetto, he mimicked the response: “ ‘Water’s blue.’ ‘What color are parks?’ ‘Parks are green.’ ”

IN fairness, it should be noted that Mr. Vignelli had designed another map that showed the subway routes overlaid on an accurate city plan. But the M.T.A. never produced it; instead, in 1976 the agency formed a committee, headed by Mr. Tauranac, to draw up an entirely new map.

The map that emerged in 1979, seven years after the publication of Mr. Vignelli’s design, showed more geographical information than any previous New York subway map. It was the first since the 1930’s to reproduce the street grid; it gave neighborhood names and pointed out major landmarks. Parks, of course, were green, and the water was blue. Subsequent maps have imported even more geography, and added more information; in 1998, for example, the M.T.A. drew in pop-up balloons showing major bus connections. Since that year, the subway map has been officially known simply as “The Map.’’

Although designers love to discuss why Mr. Vignelli’s schematic map didn’t fly, no single theory has emerged. The graphic designer Michael Bierut, however, suggests that New York’s street grid was to blame.

“Londoners are actually unclear about how close one stop is to the next,” he said. “But a lot of Manhattanites could tell you authoritatively how long it would take to walk from Fifth and 28th to Seventh and 44th. So the geographic discrepancies in the Vignelli map, which are no more than those you find in lots of subway maps around the world — they’re just glaring.”

Neither Mr. Tauranac nor Mr. Vignelli was eager to revisit the fight. Nonetheless, Mr. Vignelli offered a parting thought. “Look what these barbarians have done,” he said as he examined his copy of the current map. “All these curves, all this whispering-in-the-ear of balloons. It’s half-naturalist and half-abstract. It’s a mongrel.”