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Excellent. Size 59.5 x 45.5 Inches. This is Joan Charysyn's own copy of her 1974 station map of the New York City Commuter Rail network, designed during her tenure under Massimo Vignelli at Vignelli Associates and Unimark International. Similar to the famous 'Vignelli Map' of the New York City Subway, which Charysyn also helped design, this work exemplifies 'beauty in simplicity.' A Closer Look Covering the New York City Metropolitan or Tri-State Area, this map includes seven rail services managed by or in partnership with the Metropolitan Transit Authority, including the Long Island Railroad (LIRR), Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH), and Staten Island Rapid Transit (now Staten Island Railway, which for mapping purposes is included with the New York City subway nowadays), and the predecessors to today's Metro-North Railroad and New Jersey Transit (NJ Transit). Several features on the map were recent creations, including the 'new' Penn Station, Amtrak, and the World Trade Center, which only opened the previous year. Like the Vignelli New York City Subway map on which it is modeled, this map achieves the near-impossible in presenting the most essential information to commuters, making sense of a jumble of dozens of stations, seven commuter rail systems (most with multiple branches and both express and local service), plus connections to interurban service with Amtrak, ferry and bus connections, and alternate bus services. Charysyn erred on the side of simplicity wherever possible, too much so for some people's tastes. No mention is made of schedules, fares, express versus local services, connections with the subway or buses, or other information that might be deemed essential to travelers (though phone numbers are provided for the various services and, in theory, timetables and fare information would be available at the station). The LIRR appears as a uniform blue, with no visual distinction between its various branches, and geography is distorted for the sake of expediency (for instance, the Mineola, Hempstead, and West Hempstead stations are, in reality, in an almost-perfect north-south alignment rather than offset as here). Most egregious of all, to some at least, is the shrinkage of Manhattan, the destination of most commuters , to a comically diminutive size (an inversion of its inflation on the Vignelli subway map), and its blocky, cartoonish appearance, as is also the case with Long Island and Staten Island. In defense against these fulminations, one might point out that such information is utterly unnecessary for daily commuters regularly taking the same route. Despite its utilitarian benefits, in the years since this map's creation, the MTA's official maps have deviated from its design principles, though some occasional 'schematics' put out by it and partners (such as the Port Authority) are highly similar in style to the map seen here. What Makes a Map a Map? This work and the earlier Vignelli/Charysyn subway map expand our understanding of what a map is or could be. Rather than attempt to 'realistically' represent one of the densest population centers on the planet to scale with 'proper' distances between stations and all or even most of the potential information a commuter might need, it instead operates like a narrowly focused but easy-to-use infographic, getting the commuter from their origin station to their destination station; the commuter is left to their own devices for everything happening before and after that point, which in most cases is perfectly sufficient (especially for regular commuters, not tourists). At the same time, it retains the rough 'shape' of the rail networks and the geography of the Tri-State area, still resembling a 'typical' map for familiarity's sake. The Piecemeal Assemblage of the MTA This map was produced at a time when mass transit in New York City was in a state of crisis and flux. Railroad companies were falling into insolvency one after another. In order to maintain passenger ser.
Seller Inventory # NewYorkCommuterMap-charysyn-1974
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