Earlier this month, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Agency unveiled new maps for the city’s famously complex subway system—well, diagrams, technically, since they’re too abstracted to be considered maps. The new design marks the first major visual overhaul since 1979; ironically enough, it’s based on Massimo Vignelli’s predecessor, which riled straphangers almost immediately after its 1972 debut (but enthralled designers). For The New York Review, Zoe Guttenplan descends into the tunnels to trace the winding path of cartographic evolution.
Despite his protestations, Vignelli’s diagram is a stunning modernist image, a Piet Mondrian in Morris Louis colors. The four boroughs served by the subway are represented by cream masses floating in beige water and indicated in bold type—a sans serif to match Vignelli’s signage, which is still in use today. (Large white Helvetica text on a black background tells subway riders where they are; colored circles or diamonds containing a number or a letter tell them which trains stop there.) Orange, turquoise, sky blue, salmon pink, the green of Central Park in spring: all cascade in thick stripes down the page. When the lines turn, they do so at multiples of forty-five degrees. Where the trains stop, there is a black dot in the middle of the line. On the ten-by-ten grid, entire squares are blank, and although downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan contain vibrant clusters of stripes, nothing looks overcrowded. The Times described it as “an attempt to untangle a system that on paper often looks as confusing as a mass of spaghetti.”
More picks about maps
To Understand Mississippi, I Went to Spain
“The forces that would shape my home state’s violent history were set in motion by a 480-year-old map made by a Spanish explorer.”
Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps
“Nostalgic for a time before ubiquitous connectivity, a writer ditched his phone and relied instead on serendipity — and maps made by people he met along the way.”
The Burgeoning Science of Search and Rescue
“By analyzing reports of people who got off-track, researchers are advancing the science of ‘lost person behavior.’”
How to Map Nothing
“What if we took each sourdough selfie, each Zoom class, each Peloton ride, each Netflix binge and mapped the ecology of resources and services that have made it possible for some of us? And at the same time impossible for others?” On pandemic maps and the Great Pause.
How a Young Activist Is Helping Pope Francis Battle Climate Change
“Molly Burhans wants the Catholic Church to put its assets—which include farms, forests, oil wells, and millions of acres of land—to better use. But, first, she has to map them.”
Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World
Maps are how we orient ourselves, and how we donate a place’s value — and by extension, the value of that place’s inhabitance. What does that means for the place still left un-mapped?
