It was a uniquely pleasant experience to read Mark Krotov’s article in praise of the new subway map while riding the Queens-bound J train, which made his observations about the design’s subtle modernism feel especially miraculous. It’s true that the old version depicted Atlantic Avenue as a Borgesian nightmare of churning public transportation, clutter swept away by its more elegant successor. I also would not have noticed the clearly improved depiction of the AirTrain at JFK without Krotov’s help.
But as my train crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, I couldn’t help but feel that something was missing—that the simplification had subtracted something critical. I looked up the old map on my phone to confirm that several geographical details were expunged, including but not limited to Governors Island, Randalls Island, and Rikers Island. It’s the last of these that motivated me to write this letter.
Krotov is right to note that the new map “deploys a multitude of excellent design decisions in service of, well, service.” It’s an achievement that would’ve made me giddy when I was a kid with a fanatical obsession with trains and found in the subway map a source of endless entertainment. I would project myself into those oddly yellowed contours and fantasize about intricate schleps, satisfied by the knowledge that no matter where one starts their journey, there’s no place the subway system cannot reach.
But maps do more than tell us how to get from A to B: They define our world. On the open plain, one tells east from west by calculating the trajectory of the sun as it rises and sets. But I was born in a place where buildings mostly prevented any knowledge of the star’s position; instead, I learned to divine my cardinal directions from the all-knowing map, which charted Bleecker Street to the left of Delancey Street. It remains the most ubiquitous and influential depiction of the city’s geography that isn’t on our phones, something many New Yorkers have tattooed in their minds over the course of countless commutes.
To put it plainly: The representational function of maps is inherently ideological. In the nineteenth century, Russian admirals consulted massive, room-sized charts to plan their occupation of Kazakhstan; the territory was represented as a battlefield and ultimately, the tsar’s grand prize. Similarly, surveyors of the fledgling United States clustered city names and other details in the east, while depicting the west as unoccupied, implying that it was ripe for the taking.
Likewise, on today’s subway, the disappearance of Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal contributes to news of their contamination by large-scale industry going unnoticed; few have heard of Wards Island, which has become an extra-judicial storage home for New York’s registered sex offenders, who live in direct proximity to the playgrounds and ballfields of Randalls Island; and of course, the systemic violence of the mass incarceration epidemic finds its most concrete expression in Rikers, now totally erased from the map. About a decade ago, I encountered an art project by Parsons students that aimed to reinscribe the island into New Yorkers’ collective imaginations at a time when only its name was removed by the MTA: Their goal was to place red stickers indicating “Rikers Island is Here” on every subway map in the city, over the otherwise unnamed blob hovering above Queens. In 2025, there is not even an unlabeled island to circle.
It’s possible to design a map that eschews geographic accuracy for commuter efficiency. We could look to the São Paulo subway system, which charts abstract, colored lines on a blank background. But it would be sad for New York’s characteristic asymmetries and geographic errata to be dispensed in the name of optimization; the new version already goes too far in this direction. I’m in favor of the various design choices that have made it easier to transfer between trains, but I’m also in favor of depicting the city faithfully. We should dispel the idea that a subway map is only meant to streamline our schedules and realize in its renovated modernism a form of ideological erasure.
Ten thousand people are incarcerated on Rikers Island. I say that it’s worth remembering where they live, even if it’s convenient to forget the prison’s long history of human rights abuses. In July of this year, Michael Nieves killed himself while guards watched and did nothing. In 2015, sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder committed suicide after he was detained for three years without trial. If there’s any hope of closing the prison by 2027, a plan pushed by the Adams administration and which Mamdani has pledged to follow through on, then it relies on New Yorkers knowing of—and being able to locate—the injustice on their doorsteps.