I’m currently working on a post about the evolution of the New York City subway map and the various ways in which station location and geographical information are presented on maps from around the globe. I’ve come to the realization though that I do not have a few maps I might need for this project, and so I’m going to attempt to crowd-source. Do you, loyal SAS readers, have any subway maps from the early or mid 1990s lying around? Do you want to find a new home for them (or lend them to me for a bit)? If so, please contact me.
Over the years, I’ve written frequently about various subway map designs. We’ve looked at heart-shaped gimmicks, Massimo Vignelli’s controversial design and the Kickmap, to name a few. All of them have their pluses and minuses, and many are better than the current version suffering from information overload.
Recently, Treehugger took a look at the world’s best alternative subway maps. Included in the slideshow are many of the maps I’ve explored before as well as some gems from around the globe. I particularly enjoy Harry Beck’s failed attempt to reproduce the Paris Metro in the style of his famous London Underground map. The multi-modal map and the Triptrop map are two New York City entries worth a closer look.
In the annals of New York City subway history, nothing is more fetishized and analyzed than the Massimo Vignelli 1970s-era subway map. Over the last few years, I’ve written posts about Vignelli’s signage, an update to the Vignelli map and the Vignelli-inspired KickMap. I also own a handful of Vignelli maps from various years.
This latest find, though, takes the cake. As you can see, it is a dress with the Vignelli subway map reproduced on it. It is a silk piece part of the Francis New York spring collection. A buddy of mine found it at Nordstrom’s site where it is on sale for $249.90. My favorite part are the straps, each featuring a different Vignelli-colored subway line.
Click through for a view of the back. As today is July 3, mostly a day off from work, I won’t be posting much more. I’ll be back with the service advisories later today. Happy Fourth of July!
I love subway maps and maps about subways. I have an extensive collection of historical New York City subway maps at home and a few from other systems around the globe as well. Recently, though, something else piqued my attention. Mike Frumin, that man behind Frumination got his hands on historical subway ridership figures from every station in the system. Not only has he made the data readily available, but he has mapped it through a series of sparklines. He offers up his analysis of the map as well.
Meanwhile, two other programmers have taken the data and turned it into colorful visuals as well. This flash map looks good but distorts the station-by-station data. The other, found here, doesn’t look as sleek but is presents a far more rigorous examination of the data. Check it out.
To celebrate the city and offer up a way to carry a map in your pocket, a design firm in Korea has published a heart-shaped version of the New York City subway map.
The PSFK design blog has more about this one-of-a-kind map:
A group of Korean graphic designers called Zero Per Zero have a unique take on the typical subway map of New York City. Playing on the I Love New York logo, the entire system is visualized as a big heart. The final design was the 2008 Design For Asia Grand Award Winner for a City Railway System which seems a bit odd considering it’s a remake of an American system, but we certainly applaud the simplicity and beauty of their artistic vision.
This playful design actually functions as the map it remixes and on closer inspection, it includes pictorial representations of remarkable locations throughout the city. It’s great to see designers offer a new interpretation of such a recognizable map in a way that may even improve the mood of some of NYC’s grumpy commuters.
The map itself costs under $7 but shipping from South Korea pushes that total up to around $20. I think it’s well worth it for map collectors.
After the jump, a detail of the map, and remember that the subways are running on a Sunday schedule today. Allow extra time for travel, and have a Merry Christmas!
My nabe, done up Vignelli style. (Courtesy of Vignelli Associates via Men’s Vogue)
The Massimo Vignelli subway map is back and better than ever. As part of a charity project for Men’s Vogue, Vignelli, famous in New York for his much-maligned 1972 reinterpretation of the subway map, has updated his famous and infamous map to reflect subway realities in 2008, and his map remains a beautiful work of art.
Vignelli’s map, as I’ve discussed in the past and Tina Kelley explored yesterday on City Room, was controversial from the moment it made its its debut in the 1970s. Visual Complexity, a site on the design of complex systems, describes the beauty:
It was a marvelous conceptual map, and it was easy to read. It was a tool for navigating the subways, although not one for navigating the city streets. Out with the complicated tangle of geographically accurate train routes. No more messy angles. Instead, train lines would run at 45 and 90 angles only. Each line was represented by a color. Each stop represented by a dot. There was an obvious influence from the London Underground map, originally created by Harry Beck in 1933, however, Vignelli took it one step farther, in creating the now-famous intertwined wiring-diagram map of New York’s vastly complicated subway lines.
Kelley, writing for The Times’ website, discusses the drawbacks:
With its 45- and 90-degree angles and one color per subway line, the 1972 subway map by Massimo Vignelli was divorced from the cityscape, devoid of street or neighborhood names. It was criticized because its water was not blue and its parks were not green. Paul Goldberger called it “a stunningly handsome abstraction” that “bears little relation to the city itself.
…It was accurate in the same way a poem could describe a playground in March. Descriptive and accurate. But sometimes puzzling. People got lost using it. (The 50th Street and Broadway stop, for example, was east of 8th Avenue instead of west.)
Vignelli himself was never apologetic for this shortcomings. “On purpose we rejected any visual reference to nature or landmarks,” he said to Men’s Vogue.
He was aiming instead to duplicate the feel and style of the Underground maps from London. “People expected a map instead of a diagram. But diagrammatic representation is common practice around the world since the London Underground map of the thirties,” he said.
Meanwhile, in the intervening years, designers have attempted to rebel against the relatively bland MTA-issued Map. Eddie Jabbour’s Kick Map evokes Vignelli’s original map but with a few more details.
Vignelli’s new map is a return to the simplistic beauty of his 1970s creation. The colors of the subway lines matchup as they should, and the white-on-light-blue background forces you to examine the subway system outside the reality of New York City. The map celebrates the subway system as its own unique entity seemingly divorced from the subway. You can’t navigate around the city with this map, and admittedly, it’s probably tough to find your way to the right stop at times.
While we won’t see this Vignelli map replace The Map anytime soon, it was available for sale through Men’s Vogue for $300 with all money going toward the Green Workers Cooperative. The print run of 500 sadly sold out on May 1, but you can already find one on eBay. I envy those of you who had a chance to buy one of these unique prints. It is a collector’s item indeed.
For more close-ups of this one-of-a-kind map, Men’s Vogue has a slideshow.
This is not the world’s most efficient subway system.
In a few short weeks, on April 29, one of the year’s most anticipated video games hits the shelves. That game, as many New Yorkers know, is the latest installment in one of the most polarizing and controversial video games of all time: Grand Theft Auto.
While a discussion of a video game may seem out of place on Second Ave. Sagas, this time around, Grand Theft Auto has a New York tie-in. GTA IV takes place in Liberty City, a fictionalized and stylized version of New York City and the surrounding environs. When Rockstar Games revealed this location last year, New York politicians were expectedly up in arms about it. No politician likes the glorified violence these GTA games bring to video consoles across the country.
For the subway buffs among us, seeing one of the most graphically-advanced and obsessively-detailed video games set in New York was something of a pop culture dream come true. Sure, GTA: San Andreas featured the Los Angeles subway, but who rides that? With Liberty City, GTA has a chance to show us what the video game’s graphics rendering capabilities really are. Could it handle a 722-mile, 468-station subway system with 22 lines and various underground, at-grade and aboveground subway tracks?
Well, based on leaked maps obtained by the video game blog Kotaku from a Webshots user, the answer seems to be a disappointing no. Liberty City’s Transport Authority’s subway system pales in comparison to one run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority we currently enjoy. The maps — one is above and one is at right (click it to enlarge it) — show a small subway system with few lines and few stops that bear little relation to New York’s iconic subway map.
When the game hits, I bet Liberty City’s subways will look awfully similar to New York City’s subways but for another era. If the idea is that Liberty City is a crime-filled town where everyone’s jockeying for now power, they’re not going to be doing that while riding antiseptic R160s around town. Instead, we’ll be catapulted back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when the dirty, dingy subway were crime-filled and covered in graffiti.
With these maps a disappointing sneak peak at the game, it’s been a rough week for the New York City subways in our popular culture. With the announcement that James Gandolfini will be in the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, the subways are seemingly getting a short shrift lately. The remake of Pelham sounds like it’s taking itself too seriously while the subway maps from GTA4 seem to suggest that Rockstar isn’t taking our subways seriously enough. Alas, what’s a subway fan to do?
Nothing screams New York City quite like the subway map. The iconic map — or at least the 1998 redesign of The Map — appears in every guide book about to New York and is a ubiquitous decoration in subway cars and stations alike.
Recently, the map has made a few cameo appearances in the New York media as well. The ever-popular Best of New York issue of New York Magazine hit the stands this week. Featured on the magazine’s Web site is an artistic spelling of the words “Best of New York” as told by a folded-up subway map. Might that be because, despite all of its problems, the subway system is one of the best things about New York? I think so.
But more fun than the New York feature is an homage to the subway that appeared in the pages of The New Yorker a few weeks ago. Every year, near the February 21 anniversary of the debut of the venerable magazine, Eustace Tilley appears on The New Yorker cover. This year, the magazine opened up the Eustace Tilley design to readers and graphics designers across the country. While the Tilley issue came adorned with a Hillary/Obama cover, the winning submissions — online at The New Yorker website and Flickr — were quite entertaining.
To me, one jumped out from the pack:
That’s right; it’s a Massimo Vignelli-inspired Eustace Tilley superimposed over the stylized map of New York City. Drawn by flickr user panutfla, the Tilley subway map evokes New York and the subways in all its glory. It is the quintessential image for The New Yorker, and while he magazine didn’t honor the underground veins of the city by placing this image on the cover, it is by far one of the most New York-centric images from The New Yorker I’ve seen in a long time.
Last week, I introduced the View from Underground, a weekly posting of a photo or scene from the subway. This Tuesday’s View is, in honor of Sept. 11, a look back at impact that tragic day had on the subway.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, as events at the World Trade Center unfolded, the subways were thrown into disarray. As Randy Kennedy in The Times detailed on the 12th of September, subway service was suspended throughout the city indefinitely, and no one knew what the future would hold in Lower Manhattan.
The MTA would be up and running after a few days, but service had to be radically altered. The Cortlandt Street station on the West Side IRT was utterly destroyed as these dramatic pictures at NYCSubway.org illustrate. Nearly every line running into and out of Lower Manhattan had to be rerouted, and to address these changes, the MTA released the map excerpted above on Sept. 19, 2001, eight days later.
The service changes were extensive, and a capsule summary from the NYCSubway.org page of the various MTA map iterations succinctly shows the rerouting. The following description combines the details from the emergency black and white map released on Sept. 17 and the map shown above released two days later:
2 & 3 local and 1 express on West Side IRT; many other lower Manhattan diversions; no West Side IRT below Franklin St. and no Broadway BMT below Canal St; no 8th Ave. IND below Canal St.; Wall St. closed on East Side IRT; N and R to Brooklyn replaced by M and J respectively via Nassau Loop; W local only in Queens; 9 and Z skip-stop service suspended… [Sept. 19:] Revision of 1&2 local to Brooklyn and 3 express to 14th Street
Even today, things aren’t quite yet back to normal. As I mentioned, Cortlandt St. remains closed; the work on the Fulton St. transportation hub, spurred on by the events of 9/11, has led to numerous service changes. The reconstruction of the South Ferry station also came out of the 9/11 recovery initiatives.
It’s taken a long time, but the subways have nearly emerged from the tragic and destructive events of Sept. 11. This map can remind us of the chaos and confusion that reigned in New York six years ago.
For the straphanger in 2007, the subway system is one of those parts in New York City that’s Always Been There. We’ve always had the 1 train running up the West Side, the F, N, Q and D trains heading to Coney Island and the B, D and 4 trains going past the House that Ruth Built. The subways are such an ingrained part of city life that it’s nearly impossible to imagine the city without them.
But of course, New York survived without subways and thrived as the subways were constructed in the snaking pattern that we now recognize as the subway map. But much like the subways, the current subway map is a very concrete object. Every line is displayed in seemingly the same level of permanence with no thought to which tracks, stations or lines came first.
But some enterprising soul on the Internet has reconstructed the subway map to show just that information. On the site for Appealing Industries, someone’s personal design Website, I found the incredibly informative (and nifty) animated gif of the subway map pictured below. Through a time-delayed animation, it shows the chronological construction of the New York City subway system.
Starting with the Franklin Ave. Shuttle, remnants of the original Brooklyn El system, and the far reaches of the J line which contain the oldest surviving transit structures still in use in the city, the map moves on to the original IRT lines before extending through time. The subways and the city literally come to life as the map unfolds its stations and tunnels.
So here it is, courtesy of Appealing Industries. Click the image for a bigger version. It’ll hold your interest for a while (and keep in mind that it runs through 2005 so it may not be 100 percent up-to-date as of Sept. 6, 2007 accurate).
