With Vignelli’s emphasis on full-network connectivity, the entire city opened up to me. Through personal challenges and tragedies—my diagnosis of type 1 diabetes at six (back when it was still called juvenile diabetes), my mom’s fight with breast cancer when I was eleven, or her death from leukemia when I was sixteen—the subway was my refuge and I navigated it according to the subway map I knew by heart. Guided by Vignelli, I took the subway everywhere, without limits. New York City of the 70s was oddly segregated. There were neighborhoods that white kids were told they should not and could not go. My mom never went back to Anderson Avenue in the South Bronx, the street where she and my uncle grew up when the neighborhood was called the West Bronx, because she said it wasn’t safe. But, for me, at least, none of those restrictions applied to the subway. It was all connected, as clearly visualized in the map I internalized. And I went everywhere on it, from the South Bronx to Bed-Stuy and everywhere in-between. Thanks to Vignelli’s map, New York was not a hodgepodge of isolated lines or neighborhoods—it was a full, interconnected system life-force.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the map made me proud to be a New Yorker. The city was depicted through the eyes of an immigrant, weaving what is foreign, mysterious, unknown into something with logical simplicity and clarity. Vignelli infused the map with the love and reverence that immigrants bring to their adopted homes—that is quintessentially New York. The map had its own flavor and became the face of the New York City Transit Authority.

Yes, it was a work of art worthy of its future MoMA exhibition. But not a prissily pristine one. It was an interactive companion and I would draw on it, make notes, scribble doodles, and even add new subway lines and extensions I thought should be built. Today, transit authorities too often cede their system map to Google Maps, giving up control of how their system is represented. In so doing, they lose both the prioritization of what is important and the artistry to uniquely capture a system’s flavor and color.

And, it was free. As a kid, I recall my excitement as I approached the token booths of blessed memory and requested a complimentary subway map. I was especially excited if it was a new edition; disappointed if the token clerk told me he was all out. I confess that on the day in 1979 when the clerk handed me an entirely different-looking map, I was eager to pore through it. This map was completely different. Gone were the individual line colors and straight lines. Gone was the geographic minimalism, replaced with a more representative geography, more directly connected to the streets above.  

The new map was designed by committee under the leadership of John Tauranac, whose biggest graphological accomplishment to that point was creating a map of Lower Manhattan that identified the exact location of all public bathrooms—a most utilitarian product. But the literal representation of the new map came at a cost. Lost was the clear depiction of how the lines and stations connected into a system, the color, the beautiful symmetry, the artistry. I quickly came to miss the Vignelli map—the map I had grown up with. Later, long after it was no longer the official map, I still used it to navigate the system – to take me to Yankee Stadium where I worked as a vendor or to the Miller Concerts on the Pier where I worked concessions for the mob.

Now, almost four decades and two hundred and fifty miles removed from my formative years in New York, I have built a career as a public transportation professional. And, self-indulgently, at least according to my wife, I also like to think of myself as an artist. Both are rooted in Vignelli’s map.