New York City is a culinary capital of the world, and nothing underscores that better than the subway. Take the Q from the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach to the Greek-influenced Astoria. Journey on the 7 from Flushing’s Chinatown past some of the best Thai restaurants, taquerias and Indian joints around.
Today’s map of the day celebrates that rich tradition. From illustrators Rick Meyerowitz and Maira Kalman comes “The New York City Sub Culinary Map.” Originally created in 2004 for The New York, the pair’s map is on display through November 6 at the Pratt Gallery as part of the exhibit “You Are Here ? Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City.” I visited the gallery last weekend, and as you can guess, it’s heavy on the subway.
But first, back to Meyerowitz and Kalman. Rick explains the impetus behind this creative re-imagining of the subway map:
September 2003: I was on an A train headed downtown. I was absentmindedly staring at the subway map and thinking about lunch, when all the station names on the map suddenly rearranged themselves in my mind to become food-related names. “That’s interesting,” I thought. “What if I redid the subway map to make it a food map?”
It seemed a daunting prospect; so many places to rename! So I went to Maira Kalman, my brilliant partner in wordplay and funny names. “I love it but I don’t know if it’s doable,” I told her. Maira knocked the doubt right out of my head with characteristic subtlety: “You’re an idiot!” She told me. “It’s brilliant! We’re doing it, Mister, and we’re doing it right away.”
…We spent months doing nothing but choosing the funniest names and moving them around a pencil sketch of the map. We renamed all 468 stations and added sixteen for the Second Avenue line, which may never even be built. We renamed all the neighborhoods, parks, cemeteries and waterways – 650 names in all.
You can click on the image atop this post to see the larger version, but it’s tough to capture the creativity and originality without taking in the entire wall-sized map. The exhibit runs at the Pratt Gallery at 144 W. 14th St. between 6th and 7th Aves. through next Saturday. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, and it gets the SAS seal of approval. Check it out.
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As a bonus map of the day, check out Asma Ahmed Shikoh’s Van Wyck Boulevard. Also a part of the Pratt Gallery exhibit, Shikoh’s version of the subway map is hand-painted and in Urdu. He explains, “Painting the subway map and translating minute, tiresome details has been therapeutic for an estranged person who is trying to identify with a new city, its streets, its landmarks, its avenues. The subway map is an integral part of New York city life, a very familiar image, without which no one would have any sense of direction. I have chosen to make the translated subway map, a ‘painting’, so that its status of just being an object of functional value, can be elevated.”