The Subway Map New Yorkers Hated and Designers Worship

Massimo Vignelli's 1972 New York City subway map drew the rail lines as straight verticals, horizontals, and 45-degree diagonals. Each line got its own color. Streets and neighborhoods above ground were almost entirely erased. Central Park, a long rectangle in life, became a square on the map.

Designers loved it. Riders did not. The geographic distortions confused tourists trying to match a station to a street corner, and locals who knew the city objected to seeing their park flattened into a tile. The map oriented landmarks around Central Park incorrectly because the park had been the wrong shape to start with.

The MTA pulled it in 1979. A committee chaired by John Tauranac commissioned a replacement from Michael Hertz Associates that put the topography back: real river outlines, above-ground street grid, thinner lines. That map, with steady revisions, ran for the next four decades.

The Vignelli map kept living in design schools and museum gift shops. The Museum of Modern Art added it to its collection. In 2025 the MTA quietly rolled out a new official subway map drawn on Vignelli's logic — diagonal trunk lines, color-coded by route, geography demoted. The map that lost in 1979 won the argument fifty-three years later.