By LANDMARK WEST!
John Tauranac has lived on the Upper West Side for most of his life, and in the same apartment building at 900 West End Avenue for over fifty years. Suffice it to say that when he leaves home and heads for the IRT at 103rd Street, he has a pretty good sense of where he’s going. Chances are, he knows how to get you where you’re going, too.
You probably know Tauranac’s work. He was the creative director of the 1979 MTA subway map, the bones of today’s map.
Although MTA pocket maps are less common thanks to phone-based apps (and the absence of staffed subway booths to dispense the paper ones), MTA subway maps remain a NYC fixture, prominently displayed at the MTA website and sharing platform walls and train car interiors with advertisements for delivery services, apartment searches, and fixes to ills we maybe didn’t think we had.
Tauranac’s goal has been to put geography into perspective, to get people from where they are to where they want to go. Never trained in cartography or graphic design, Tauranac looks inwardly and is guided by logic.
Essentially a writer, mapping came to Tauranac almost serendipitously. In the early 1970s, he decided to write about undercover passageways through and under buildings in Midtown that pedestrians could take to stay dry in the wet and warm in the cold. The story was an instant cure for insomnia, and “Map” flashed before him. He charted the routes and created roughs, and the editors at New York Magazine liked the idea. Tauranac’s roughs were handed to a graphic designer who metamorphosed them into a finished product. His “Undercover Map” made the cover.
Tauranac leaned further into the field by writing guidebooks for the MTA’s Culture Bus Loops as a freelance project for the Municipal Art Society, whereupon the MTA asked him if he would write and edit a travel guide to the city. Seeing New York: The Official MTA Travel Guide, was published in 1976, and it included a geographic map of the subway system.
The official MTA map at the time was Massimo Vignelli’s diagram, the cartographic apotheosis of the Bauhaus dictum that less was more. An MTA subway map committee was already at work. Tauranac was appointed, and soon heading it as chairman.
The debate between abstraction and practical geography eventually became a true debate, or at least a public discussion between Vignelli and Tauranac that was held at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in 1978. Neither designer was swayed by the other.
Progress on the proposed map stalled. The then-existing color-coding system ascribed an individual color to each subset of a trunk line. With 18 lines operating uptown-downtown in Midtown, each in its own color, it made depicting service even on a quasi-geographic map impossible.
A color-coding system modeled on the trunk-line concept of the London Underground was Tauranac’s goal, but it was an idea that was as good as dead in the water. However, Phyllis Cerf Wagner, the wife of former Mayor Wagner, was heading the MTA’s Aesthetics Committee, and she saw the logic in the trunk-line system. Chairman Harold Fisher agreed, and TA President John deRoos likewise agreed. The trunk-line color-coding system for NYC was born.
The MTA declared Tauranac redundant in 1987, and one thing has certainly changed since his departure. The MTA crammed maps of all its constituent agencies into one cumbersome document, sacrificing important elements along the way. At its root, however, the DNA remains the same on the subway map—it is the Tauranac map.
Tauranac has been publishing his own maps since the 1990s. His most recent subway map comes with the subtitle “Weekday, Weekend & Late-Night Service,” plus “Index of Stations, Service Guide, and Local Rail Map.”
He incorporates a fast way of imparting two elements of information in one fashion with some readily understood graphics on this subway map. Service at each station is telegraphed by having the stopping patterns right on the route lines themselves in symbols that indicate local service (a square or rectangle) and express service (a circle or oval), with the service within the appropriate symbol. The symbols are in the color of the route unless there is a transfer to another trunk line, when the frame is black, and he uses corridor-like symbols to show transfers between lines.
And remember, there’s seven-day-a week service, and then there is part-time service, which can be any number of times. The specificity of service at each station is distinguished on the map, and color coding again comes to the rescue. Seven-day-a week service is depicted in black, weekday service in red, weekend service in pink, service that only operates at stations rush hours in blue, and service that skips stations rush hours in gray. (A simplified late-night subway map stands on its own on the back of the pocket map.)
The street of operation is included as an inherent part of the station name, immediately answering the basic question of where to find a station. The coordinates are right there. And when the street of operation intersects an additional street such as Broadway at 72 Street, where Broadway also intersects Amsterdam Avenue, that street name too is included.
Symbols at stations impart basic information. Outdoor stations are represented by a symbol for the sun, for instance. When a train emerges from a tunnel, such as at 125 Street-Broadway, the whole ambience changes. Extending the idea is the inclusion of bridges as a graphic device. No subaqueous tunnels on those stretches, and the views, like the views from many outdoor stations, are worth the price of admission.
Other insightful additions are “No U-Turn” symbols which flag stations where passengers cannot transfer to trains going in an opposite direction without paying another fare. The same symbol serves as a “watch-it.” Those station entrances lead to platforms with service in one direction only.
And there is the specificity of terminals. Tauranac includes the station name and the service terminating there within a color-coded rectangle, with full-time terminals filled with the color of the line, part-time terminals with the color of the line in outline. If a line is extended from a part-time terminal, that line is dashed.
Tauranac’s map has an accordion fold. To open it, simply raise the top panel, drop down bottom panel, open at the first crease, and there before you are all of Manhattan and the Bronx, and western Brooklyn and Queens. And to fold it back up, just think accordion again.
The mapmaker still cannot draw a straight line, and he describes himself as a “technojerk,” although he can work computerized graphics – he uses Adobe Illustrator – which he deems “a godsend.”
His 24 X 36-inch subway map poster is in the window of Jack’s Art Gallery, 2855 Broadway in Morningside Heights, his maps are available at Barnes & Noble, and both his pocket map and poster are available through our site BUY FOLD OUT MAP! BUY POSTER MAP!
John Tauranac never seems to keep idle. The author of numerous articles and books, he is looking forward to the release of his next book, New York’s Scoundrels, Scalawags, and Scrappers: The City in the Last Decade of the Gilded Age, due out in Spring of 2025. In fact, you might even describe him as a “scrapper.”
“Scoundrels were people who abused the system—the Tammany Hall politicians, for instance,” explains Tauranac. “Scalawags were people who just played the system. Scrappers were those who fought to change the system, to improve it, and make things better.” Despite great resistance, John Tauranac has yet to give in.