Thirty-eight pages into issue NYRA #46/47, I was downright chipper from all I’d read. Then I came across Mark Krotov’s take on the latest MTA subway map on page thirty-nine (“Track Changes”). Here, I finally bubbled up and over with something like rage. What Krotov misses in his head-over-heels appraisal of Vignelli’s updated cartographic layout of the New York City rail system (not to mention his outright dismissal of the very map we lived with from the year of my Manhattan birth, 1979) is that the city’s citizens—as well as its millions of annual visitors—move about those rail lines. Seeing the grid on the subway map, even pared back as it was in the last iteration, provided tremendous clarity as to where a passenger would be de-training. Where there were streets, avenues, and pathways, there is, in the replacement map, a disorienting desert of white. Gone are the mention of avenue names, of neighborhoods, of iconic buildings and parks, all of which told the people crucial information about where they would ascend post-ride. As Krotov praises the spatial accuracy of Staten Island’s depiction, he fails to lament the squat cube that has become of Central Park. Describing the rendering of Atlantic Avenue–Barclays as “virtuosic,” he ignores its bewildering, tentacular sprawl of lines in yellow, orange, red, green, and blue. Most importantly, 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, and by omitting place- names—the sites and streets, the lakes and reservoirs—those who behold the new 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.
What is New York City without those foundational pieces? And what is a New York City subway map that fails to speak directly to it?