Award-Winning 1960s NYC Subway Map Unearthed
March 13, 2015, 3:50 p.m.
A local lawyer won a subway map design competition in the 1960s, and ended up bringing color to future maps.
Before Massimo Vignelli created his iconic subway map in 1972, the NYC Transit Authority held a design competition in an effort to create a more user-friendly map for straphangers. In 1964, R. Raleigh D'Adamo, a lawyer, won that competition with this map:
According to FastCo, the original map disappeared not long after, and was only somewhat unearthed at the end of last year when D'Adamo himself found a color photograph of it sitting in his basement.
"D’Adamo's design featured color-coding that differentiated local and express routes, an innovation at the time. Station symbols were only drawn in spots on the line where the train stopped. To save space, lines that shared routes were indicated by alternating blocks of color instead of parallel strips. Over the course of three years, D’Adamo’s design underwent major revisions before it became New York City’s official subway map in 1967."
Peter Lloyd of Transit Map History, along with graphic designer Reka Komoli, digitized the map, which is what you see above. Lloyd that this "painstaking reproduction of the hand-drawn map took about three months." The map was presented on Tube Map Central, where Lloyd explained that D'Adamo is responsible for giving our subway maps all that color—prior to 1967, there were only 3 colors, which represented the IRT, BMT, and IND lines.
The photograph of the hand-drawn map hasn't been released (yet?), and the original paper that D'Adamo drew it on is believed to have been lost somewhere inside the Transit Authority’s publicity office.