Spaghetti Underground
April 21, 2025 at 04:51PMEarlier this month, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Agency unveiled new maps for the city’s famously complex subway system—well, diagrams, technically, since they’re too abstracted to be considered maps. The new design marks the first major visual overhaul since 1979; ironically enough, it’s based on Massimo Vignelli’s predecessor, which riled straphangers almost immediately after its 1972 debut (but enthralled designers). For The New York Review, Zoe Guttenplan descends into the tunnels to trace the winding path of cartographic evolution.
Despite his protestations, Vignelli’s diagram is a stunning modernist image, a Piet Mondrian in Morris Louis colors. The four boroughs served by the subway are represented by cream masses floating in beige water and indicated in bold type—a sans serif to match Vignelli’s signage, which is still in use today. (Large white Helvetica text on a black background tells subway riders where they are; colored circles or diamonds containing a number or a letter tell them which trains stop there.) Orange, turquoise, sky blue, salmon pink, the green of Central Park in spring: all cascade in thick stripes down the page. When the lines turn, they do so at multiples of forty-five degrees. Where the trains stop, there is a black dot in the middle of the line. On the ten-by-ten grid, entire squares are blank, and although downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan contain vibrant clusters of stripes, nothing looks overcrowded. The Times described it as “an attempt to untangle a system that on paper often looks as confusing as a mass of spaghetti.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/21/nyc-subway-map-nyrb/
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