Who Thinks Subway Maps Can Be Controversial? This Guy!

MTA mapmakers battle it out in the geekiest of geeky subjects:

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.

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.”

. . .

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.'”

. . .

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.”

See also: The non-mongrel 1974 Subway Map.