It's not online yet, but the Spring 2006 issue of Columbia, the university's alumni magazine, has an interesting profile of John Tauranac, a 1963 graduate of the School of General Studies who subway wonks know as the father of the 1979 subway map. That map was geographically accurate and assigned specific colors to the subway lines, which with some tweaks here and there is largely the one you see today.
So why are the logos for the 4, 5, 6 trains, which run through some of the nation's richest neighborhoods, green? And why were the 1, 2, 3 and 9 trains, which run through some of the nation's more liberal precincts, assigned the color red? Here's Tauranac's fun take: "I always thought there was a certain cynical reality to the colors. I liked the green line going on the Upper East Side where the money is. I liked the idea of having the red line run up the Upper West Side, because that's where the liberals are, who used to be called the Compsymps" -- or Communist sympathizers.
Tauranac improved on the 1972 map designed by Massimo Vignelli. It's an awesome, very 1970s work of art, but the rap on it has always been that it's a little too stylized to be practical. "There were people who simply looked at it as an aesthetic object," Tauranac told Columbia of the 1972 map. "That's not what a map is."
Tauranac still gives any new map the OK. He is, after all, the man "who argued over the right shade of orange for the B, D and F lines 30 years ago."
Here's a quick bio of Vignelli. Check out his 1972 map. Here's Wikipedia on Tauranac. And take a tour of Tauranac's many Gotham books on Amazon.
-- Rolando Pujol
