John Tauranac (born 1939) writes on New York City history and architecture, teaches the subject and gives tours of the city, and designs city maps and transit maps.
Work
His first published maps (1972 and 1973) were New York Magazine’s "Undercover Maps", which showed how to navigate passageways through and under buildings in Midtown and Lower Manhattan in order to stay dry in rain and warm in cold weather.
Tauranac wrote guidebooks for the Culture Bus Loops operated by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority as a freelance project for the Municipal Art Society (1973, 1974), whereupon he was hired by the MTA to write and edit "Seeing New York: The Official MTA Travel Guide," which included a depiction of the New York City Subway in a geographic light (1976). He went on to chair the MTA Subway Map Committee that designed the 1979 subway map, which, in addition to depicting the subway in a geographic perspective, simplified the system with the introduction of a color-coding system based on trunk lines. For his dual roles, he was awarded a commendation for design excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Transportation. He has since designed dozens of maps, many under the Tauranac imprint, including Manhattan Block By Block: A Street Atlas.
Tauranac’s books include The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark, Elegant New York, Essential New York, and The View From the 86th Floor. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, New York Magazine, Seaport Magazine, The Encyclopedia of New York City, and other publications.
Tauranac teaches New York City history and architecture at NYU's School of Continuing & Professional Studies.
New York City Subway map
For most of the twentieth century, official maps of the New York City Subway were geographic in the sense that they represented the actual coastline and selected topographical features such as parks, zoos, and stadiums. There was often some distortion to fit things in - Manhattan was often broadened, and Brooklyn twisted around toward the northeast, but the maps preserved the broad facts of the geography. From 1958 to 1978, the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) conducted a twenty-year experiment with diagrammatic subway maps, which showed the topology of the subway network but dispensed with most of the topographical detail, schematized the coastline, and abstracted the subway lines onto a grid. John Tauranac brought this experiment to an end in 1979.
The William Ronan era
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) was founded in 1968, and its first chairman, Dr William J. Ronan, sought to establish a modern brand image. Unimark International, in its New York office headed by Massimo Vignelli, gave him this through two things: The wholesale replacement of the inconsistent and out-of-date subway signage by an elegant and efficient system, designed by Robert Noorda and Massimo Vignelli, which is still in use today. A diagrammatic map of the subway system, launched in 1972.
The David Yunich era
In 1974, Ronan was replaced as chairman by David Yunich, formerly Vice Chairman at Macy's department store. Yunich brought an explicit focus on marketing the subway service, saying at his swearing-in that he would examine "any innovative marketing idea" and "Transit marketing is not too different from offering a new line in men's shirts or automobiles". He created a Marketing Department and appointed as its Director Claire McCarthy, who hired John Tauranac as contributing editor of a compendious volume "Seeing New York: The Official MTA Guide book" in time for the United States Bicentennial which brought an influx of visitors to New York. The guidebook promoted the City of New York as a place to visit and enjoy, and promoted the subway as the means of getting around the city. Yunich also brought from Macy's his former colleague Fred Wilkinson (as Executive Officer for Passenger Services), who in 1975 formed the Subway Map Committee, with the aim of designing a new subway map that would not simply tell riders how to get from one station to another - as the existing Vignelli map did, but would also promote the city and its subway, encouraging people to visit and explore it and to use the subway.