How the Subway Map Got Its Colors
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The New York City subway map is a precise tangle of bright, colorful lines. But it didn’t always look like that. The subways were assigned colors with the help of one R. Raleigh D’Adamo,a lawyer with two intertwined hobbies: trains and printing.
In 1964, Mr. D’Adamo was one of three first-place winners of a public contest to design a new subway map. What he designed changed the look of the map, and that development was the subject of a lunch hosted byTypophiles, a nonprofit organization devoted to fine typography and bookmaking.
President David S. Rose explained that Mr. D’Adamo (who was not a professional cartographer) had seen a newspaper article about the contest and submitted his entry to the New York City Transit Authority.
“Fundamental to my idea,” Mr. D’Adamo said,”was the extensive use of color coding to indicate the various subway lines, and abandoning the old tradition of using only three colors, one for each of the original three companies.”
Those three companies, nearly unknown to recent arrivals, were: Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), Brooklyn Manhattan Transit (BMT), and Independent Subway System (IND).
At the time, the London Underground used eight colors to represent eight subway lines. Paris employed eight colors for fifteen lines. New York used only three colors for 34 lines.The inescapable conclusion, Mr. D’Adamo argued in his winning entry, was that “maps of New York subways are trying to make too few colors do too much work.”
The specifications in the contest were geared toward professional cartographers, so Mr. D’Adamo had approached the owner of the Hagstrom map company in New York, Andrew Hagstrom. Mr. D’Adamo offered to team up with him in designing the map. Hagstrom had made his first map of the New York subway in 1936 with the IND in red, IRT in blue, and the BMT lines in yellow (later changed to green). Cross-hatching was on the Flushing line and the Astoria line, where the IRT and BMT operated joint service. “Well, there is no map better than my map,” he recalled Hagstrom telling him. Mr. D’Adamo said, to audience laughter: “That ended the conversation.”
In his proposal, Mr. D’Adamo worked up a number of color schemes, trying to determine which colors wouldn’t clash with one another. The winning entries were turned over to a Hofstra engineering professor named Stanley Goldstein,who undertook a study before the TA came out with a map in 1967.The resulting design took Mr. D’Adamo’s idea of color-coding and assigned colors to each subway line.
At the Typophiles lunch, Mr. D’Adamo gave a slide show of the history of New York City subway maps, showing an early map of the IRT. It was color-coded red for subway and blue for elevated trains. A BMT map had black for subways and red for elevated trains. Because these companies had been in competition with each other, he said, these maps didn’t show the routes of the other companies. “It fell to private map developers to show the routes of more than one company,” he said.
Eventually the three companies were unified in June 1940. Mr. D’Adamo also showed the artistically striking 1972 subway map by Massimo Vignelli that kept the color-coding. He said the public rebelled, though, since the map had “no bearing whatsoever to geography.”John Tauranac, who chaired the committee that produced the subway map in 1979, said in defense of Mr. Vignelli that his ultimate goal had been to make two separate sets of maps, schematic ones for use in the system itself, and geographic neighborhood maps at the stations for people to orient themselves. “The transit authority decided not to spend the money on the geographic maps,” Mr. Tauranac said.
Around 1976, psychologist Arline Bronzaft went to the public and tested the Vignelli map against a one-color geographic map. In the 1970s, she said, “People wanted to be able to relate what was underground to what was above-ground.” With crime more prevalent than today, some were fearful of the subway.A map with neighborhoods, parks, museums, and colleges noted was “an invitation to use the system to get to the sites of New York.” If you want people to be less fearful of the system, she said, “relate it to the real world.” Ms. Bronzaft said she found that people also wanted the colors retained.
To conclude, Mr. D’Adamo said,”Color-coding is here to stay.” He also added, “I think the current NYC Transit map is the best yet.”
Among those in the audience were the director of the New York Transit Museum Gabrielle Shubert and museum senior curator Charles Sachs; MTA senior manager for production in the marketing and corporate communications department, Charles Gordanier.
For more information on the Typophiles go to www.typophiles.org. The group was originally called the Biblio-Beef-Eaters until a book designer at Harper & Brothers, Arthur Rushmore, proposed the name Typophiles in the 1930s.
