Though you and I are only familiar with a undivided MTA function , scads of other maps have set about to make the NYC subway , er , somewhat comprehensive over the year . It ’s hard to imagine that the 1 , 2 , and 3 production line were n’t always ruby-red , or that the L was once known as the “ 16 Line , ” which is what make these honest-to-goodness function so fun to peruse .
The subway mapping we all know today is broadly speaking based on a famous 1972 invention by Massimo Vignelli , an Italian - American architect whose gem - colored diagram eschewed geographical Lunaria annua for optic clarity . At the time , Vignelli ’s elegant Modernist diagram wee-wee a lot of New Yorkers off . “ A fortune of people make out it,”he said thirty years later . “ And a lot of citizenry hate it , too , by the elbow room . ” Eventually , the map was replace with the slightly more realistic version we have it away today . But Vignelli ’s Helvetic - swathed iconography still graces everything from shirt and patsy to tattoo and children ’s book of account .
So what did the New York tube system expect like before our current tan - and - rainbow map go forth ? Well , for one matter , it appeared far denser and more unmanageable to study . But those early maps also held a mirror up to the technical and design currents in the world at gravid . The ways in which selective information was get were changing rapidly in the first half of the twentieth C : From the way printing presses work , to the maturation of san serif typefaces , to a gyration in how graphic house decorator think about communicating through images .
All of that is writ large in these subway mapping fromNYC Subway ’s archive . They ’re accompanied by the covers of each function , good manners of the awesomely comprehensive websiteSubway . Ru(brought to our attention byUntapped Cities ) . see them out below — but first , a GIF .
Imagevia .
The MTA also begin publishing “ dark ” maps , which have a non-white color dodging to announce the change from mean solar day to evening Robert William Service . They ’re notable for their commissioned artist covers , too :
mapsnew york
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