Map of the Month--July 2014

New York City Subway Guide, 1974. Brooklyn Historical Society Map Collection.

For July’s Map of the Month, I have chosen a 1974 copy of the “New York City Subway Guide,” to commemorate the work of Massimo Vignelli, who died in New York on May 27. This map was issued by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from 1972 to 1979, when it was superseded by the map created by Michael Hertz Associates, which is still in use after several updates and revisions.

Vignelli’s map is now a design landmark, but when it was issued, many complained of its distortions of New York geography—Central Park has become a squat, grey square—and general indifference to relative distances.  Indeed, the features that make this map so beautiful and elegant—the muted neutral colors of the rivers and parks used to offset the jewel tones of the subway lines and the ‘cubing’ of the geography in order to make it conform to the perfect square of the sheet—are exactly what bothered the riders who actually used the map for travel. The abstracted representation of geography on the map was too distant from experience for many people.

To appreciate Vignelli’s accomplishment, compare this map to the “New York City Subway Map and Guide” published in 1967, when the integration of the BMT and IND lines resulted in the opening of the Grand Street station and the creation of free transfers between lines at Delancy Street. This map used color for the different subway lines, but unfortunately used boxes to communicate different ideas. The result is a sheet with lots of boxes that must be carefully read.  This map was described by architectural critic Peter Blake in New York Magazine in April 1978 (as cited by Peter Shaw in an online article 2008) as “a battlefield filled with typographers and color-experts locked in mortal battle.”

To see what he means, compare the Delancy Street transfer of the 1967 version of the subway map to Vignelli’s version below:

Detail of Delancy Street transfer. New York City Subway Guide, 1974. Brooklyn Historical Society Map Collection.

The current MTA map, known simply as “The Map”, also uses color to indicate the different subway lines and simple dots to indicate stops or transfers (Vignelli, who inspired subsequent map makers, had himself been inspired by London Underground maps), but “The Map” also contains much more information. It is now a visual compendium of rapid transit for all 5 boroughs as well as MTA railroads of the Metropolitan area, and it gives information on bus and ferry transfers for individual stations. Not surprisingly, it is physically much larger. It is a marvel of graphic communication, but I don’t think it would be described as elegant.

For elegance, head over to the MTA web site, where “The Map” can be accessed online in different permutations—individual line, weekend or late editions. Link to the Weekender and choose ‘subway diagram view,’ which Vignelli designed with associates for the MTA in 2011 as an interactive online map. An adaptation of this design is also available as an app for iphone and android, and we are once more able to carry  Massimo Vignelli’s abstracted and beautiful vision of our subway in our pockets.

The Peter Shaw article I mentioned, “The (mostly) true story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway”, 2008, is an account of the adoption of Helvetica as the NYC Transit font and it sheds a great deal of light on the evolution of uniform design, maps as well as signage, within the MTA. The MTA took significant strides in uniform design in the 1960s and 1970s, and Vignelli’s contributions were important and lasting.

Interested in seeing more maps? You can view the BHS map collection anytime during the library’s open hours, Wed.-Sat., from 1-5 p.m. No appointment is necessary to view most maps.

This map was cataloged with funding provided by a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) “Hidden Collections” grant.