Henry Beck’s Map Style in New York City

Abstract

ABSTRACT The success of Beck’s map of underground railways in London led several people, including Beck, to consider applying his techniques to the New York City Subway. The octilinear diagrammatic form, and the symbols for stations and interchanges, have all been adopted in the NYC Subway map at various times. The first attempt, just five years after the launch of Beck’s map in 1933, was a comprehensively Beckian solution by Thomas Stephen, a Glaswegian émigré in New York. That was an evolutionary dead-end, but twenty years later the Transit Authority adopted a Beck-inspired map by German émigré George Salomon, who visited London in the 1930s while studying under Eric Gill. Salomon ushered in two decades of diagrammatic subway maps, ending in 1979 with the jettisoning of Vignelli’s design, which the Metropolitan Transport Authority has been tentatively reintroducing since 2012. The author uses primary sources to chronicle these episodes of Beckism in New York.