note that Lexington Avenue is red, not green): Working sketch for the new subway map, by Nobu Siraisi, late Fall 1978 Siraisi selected another one of his possible colour schemes and used it while developing aspects of the map such as transfer symbols (e.g. (The Vignelli Center for Design Studies has another slide that shows three of these colours (2,3,EE) but not all of them.)Ī later colour scheme of Nobu Siraisi, after September 1978 This is from the Noorda Design Studio, but not many people know of it. There is no picture of the map at this stage of its development, but the report does mention that the rectangular route markers (see above) had been replaced with circular ones (see below).īut … I recently found this scan of a Unimark slide, which shows an intermediate colour scheme, circa 1966. The only written material I found was a report by Barrington in May 1966 on a survey of public opinion about the new map. (Kind of like Salomon had wanted to do …) We have almost no documentation of what exactly was going on with the design between Goldstein’s June 1965 report and the final map that Diamond printed in November 1967. Meanwhile, in 1966, the TA had engaged the services of Unimark International, led by Massimo Vignelli, to rework the subway signage. The following year, D’Adamo’s concept went through prototyping stages with Dr Stanley Goldstein at Hofstra University and then Jerome Adler at the TA messed around with the designs and finally they were given to Dante Calise at the printing firm Diamond International to sort out in 1967. Raleigh D’Adamo’s route markers, from Reka Komoli’s digital reconstruction of D’Adamo’s map At the end of each line was a route marker, and here they all are: You can see the downtown segment of his map above (digitally re-created by Reka Komoli). He proposed the innovation of assigning a different colour to each end-to-end route. They awarded three winners but only one went forward into the design of a new map: Raleigh D’Adamo. What to do?Īnticipating this problem in 1964, the TA ran a Subway Map Contest over that summer. So, the three-colour scheme was no longer tenable. After the Chrystie Street Connection opened, the red and yellow lines were no longer separate. This worked until 1967, when the Chrystie Street Connection under Chinatown allowed interworking of the BMT and IND. So, he designed only a new diagrammatic map, but he was obliged to stick to the old three-colour scheme. Salomon wanted to rationalise the entire system of signage as well as the map, but they wouldn’t let him. In 1953, the Board was superseded by the more forward-thinking Transit Authority (TA), who soon commissioned George Salomon to design a new map. The key to subway lines in Hagstrom’s map (1956). Even though the three railroads had now been administratively unified, they remained operationally separate, so the three-colour scheme was fine. That convention continued from 1943 to 1956. This represented the three networks in separate colours. Rather than designing its own map, the Board bought in copies of a commercial map by Andrew Hagstrom. In 1940, they were brought under a single public body, the Board of Transportation. In the beginning, the New York City subway was built and run by three companies, the IRT, BMT, and IND, who each had their own maps. I call it the Rosetta Stone of Subway Colours.īefore I show it to you, I have to explain some of the background to the complex story of subway colours. There were a number of memos and letters of background information and, suddenly, in a folder labelled “Miscellaneous”, was the most extraordinary thing. This one box was pretty much all that was left. Sadly, almost all of his papers were discarded. Mr Ingalls, previously a reporter for the New York Times, had joined the Transit Authority in the summer of 1964, and had overseen three transformations of the subway map, in 1967, 1972, and 1979. The archivist, Carey Stumm, brought out a box that had recently arrived from a former desk of Leonard Ingalls. On my second visit to the archives of the New York Transit Museum, on March 4, 2010, I was sifting through boxes of papers, looking forever for clues to the evolution of the subway map of New York City. One piece of paper was the key to the trunk colours of the subway …
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