The summer of 2007 is memorable to me for two reasons. First, I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Astana, Kazakhstan’s bewildering (if perhaps not quite bewildering enough) planned capital city. And second, I got access to an advance copy of Spoon’s sixth album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. At no point during that summer’s long and multimodal commutes did I dare to dream that a credited co-writer of “Don’t You Evah,” the ninth best song on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, would one day declare that my writing filled him with “something like rage.”
It’s a real honor to hear from Julian Tepper. As far as the substance of his feedback, though—huh. Tepper argues that I “missed” and “dismissed” the fact that people have historically used the subway map to get around New York. I didn’t. He writes that “those who behold the new New York City subway map will no doubt feel far less for the dream that our city is based on and the mystique and sense of awe that defines its spirit.” They won’t. He asks “what is a New York City subway map that fails to speak directly to it?” Here I can’t help but think of a line from “Don’t You Evah”: “Famous-sounding words make your head feel light.”
When Tepper writes that the now-departed map “provided tremendous clarity as to where a passenger would be de-training” (“de-training” is really nice) and observes that the new one has transformed Central Park into a “squat cube,” he’s lodging complaints almost identical to the ones lodged against the O.G. Vignelli map in the years before Tepper’s Manhattan birth. Consistency certainly has its place, but the gulf between judgment and reflexive reaction is wide and deep, like Grand Central Madison. I’m not above reflexive reaction myself, especially toward Vignelli haters, but I can admit that his contemporary critics had a point. (His map was, for one thing, aggressively beige.) Still, as I indicated—or as I thought I indicated—ours is an age of smartphone ubiquity, which means that today’s subway map necessarily has a different function than it did a decade ago, much less in 1979. (This is to say nothing of the new map’s digitality—a topic I gave short shrift to in my review. More on that later.)
Tepper’s tendency toward anachronistic thinking is a little frustrating, but I’m more interested in the latent provincialism of this style of critique. Tepper writes that “while a map is about geographic info primarily, imagination—and the fueling thereof—is what makes it beautiful and alive and worthy of our minds.” Would anyone in any other major world city ever think of saying such a thing about their subway map? Are riders of the Shenzhen Metro leading lives of spiritual exhaustion because the pale green hexagon of Lianhuashan Park is absent from that map’s Harry Beck–style “disorienting desert of white”? Are Paulistas lacking “crucial information” because, as Max Feigelson points out, the Tietê River is nowhere to be found on their transit map?
New York pride, always justified, can easily congeal into New York solipsism. I find the latter basically harmless at the level of cartographic criticism, but unfortunately it also manifests in more consequential ways. The MTA’s refusal to adhere to standardization, much less international trends, is well documented. Did 54th Street–Hudson Yards really need a bespoke inclined elevator that cost millions, delayed the station’s opening by months, and was broken when I walked by it the other night? Why isn’t the MTA ordering more open-gangway trains, which accommodate a greater number of passengers and are ubiquitous and uncontroversial outside the US? Time and again, the insistence on our own uniqueness leads to decisions that make our city meaningfully less livable. New York is at its best when it’s porous and open to new ideas and approaches—and to new mayors who come into power armed with new ideas and new approaches.
If, as I suppose I’m contending, the new subway map can help make us more modern and cosmopolitan, I wonder if its own modernity might be key to that effort. I’m writing this toward the end of the first week of the F/M swap, a sensible service change that has attracted the kind of news coverage that sensible service changes always attract (weird, overheated). On Monday, as the F and the M traded places for the first time, I glanced at a digital map on the 7 and noticed that the new arrangement was already in effect onscreen. The speed of the shift was bracing—to paraphrase the best song on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, no ghost lingered. Later that evening, I saw a photo on Bluesky of a countdown clock taken the previous day. The next Jamaica-bound F was three minutes away, and fourth in line was the Transit Museum’s holiday train, arriving in twenty-eight minutes. There were Christmas lights onscreen, and an old token in place of a subway bullet. Festive!
Both of these data points—a map that can be adjusted instantly and a countdown clock that can be fun—rhyme with Feigelson’s rich and thoughtful letter. Is the new map’s “renovated modernism … a form of ideological erasure”? To some extent, yes. My thoughts on these matters are more provisional than they should be—the print deadline looms—but erasure or not, I’d submit that the digital mutability of the new map might offer an opportunity for the MTA (and for New Yorkers) to experiment with the form and to engage more robustly with the city’s landscape and its contradictions.
Feigelson’s letter called to mind the late-night version of the pre-2025 map, which I dimly recall procuring from the Transit Museum annex the day it was introduced in 2012. The night map was much more attractive than its daytime sibling—how could it not be, with all that bluish gray?—but it was also exciting in its implication that a subway map could change with the mood of the day. The old map was parodied, iterated, and re-interpreted in countless ways; the new map is already starting to get the same treatment. But I guess what I’m imagining in response to Feigelson’s prompt is something a little more civic-minded and collective—the night map but make it infinitely variable. What if, one day, every screen in the system took a pass on the ads for AI bullshit, the Stratton ski resort, and Paramount+ originals and presented commuters with a map that one-upped Tepper and made note of every lake, reservoir, underground stream, and puddle in the five boroughs? On another day we could get a pixel-sized dot for each of the city’s public bathrooms. And for weeks at a time we’d see a map that brought to the surface all of New York’s authoritarian infrastructure— Rikers, of course, but also the NYPD light towers Elvia Wilk wrote about so brilliantly (pun emphatically unintended) in NYRA #46/47, and the “million-dollar blocks” where the government expends incredible resources on the arrest and imprisonment of formerly incarcerated people, as identified by the Center for Spatial Research in a 2011 report.
I won’t push the reverie too far. Screens, of course, are also popular with the police, who rely on them for underground surveillance and diversion in the form of Candy Crush Saga. Radical mapmaking won’t make those cops less coercive. But we should always expect more from our municipal institutions. High expectations (and felicitous outcomes) are particularly important at a moment when the threats against New York and New York’s ways of life are so extreme. Sean Duffy’s deer-in-the-train-headlights appearances on Fox News must seem comical to the vast majority of New Yorkers who have contact with the MTA on a daily basis, but his seemingly earnest expressions of terror re: the alleged depravity of life underground obviously tap into all kinds of zombified Vignelli-era anxieties. I’m convinced that the new map’s “renovated modernism” goes some way toward refuting these sinister perceptions. Contra Tepper’s nostalgia and the neo-historicist atrocities Duffy’s boss is working to impose by fiat and bulldozer, modernism can be “beautiful and alive and worthy of our minds.” Modernism worthy of our minds can be found in nearly every corner of the city, and we’re lucky to now have it underground, once again.