16 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
a much hated composite. Then came
Massimo Vignelli, an Italian designer
who drafted a map that was crisp, beau-
tiful, and easy to read, but defiantly in-
different to geography. The map is in the
collection of the Museum of Modern
Art, but the M.T.A. ditched it after seven
years, considering it too abstract.
Today’s official map emerged from the
work of a committee, headed by John Tau-
ranac, a writer in the transportation au-
thority’s marketing department who hated
the Vignelli design and pursued one that
correlated more closely with the actual
city. That map, presented in 1979, was cel-
ebrated, but over the years it has been re-
peatedly tinkered with, and has evolved
into a visual mess. Last summer, Tauranac
petitioned the M.T.A. to hire him to re-
vamp the design. When the agency ig-
nored him, he went to the press, telling
the Post, “It’s incumbent on me as a map
designer to say, ‘Look, schmuck, you could
do a better map, and I could do it for
you.’” He added, “I wouldn’t say ‘schmuck.’”
Berman’s map is suavely graphic, like
Vignelli’s, but it also adheres to the city’s
geography. He has earned a few thou-
sand dollars selling it online. Last month,
though, he got a notice from Etsy, say-
ing that the M.T.A. had ordered the site
to stop selling it. Berman got on the phone
with an M.T.A. lawyer. “He alleged that
I had ripped off the Weekender,” Berman
said, referring to an obscure online map
that the M.T.A. issued in 2011. He told
the M.T.A. that he had created his map
years earlier, and that he would not comply
with the agency’s order.
Other amateur cartographers sym-
pathized. Eddie Jabbour, the creator of
the KickMap, a subway app, told Ber-
man that the M.T.A. had hassled him,
too. Even Tauranac, who for decades has
been drafting unofficial subway maps,
said he was once ordered to desist. “It’s
like déjà vu all over again,” he said.
“It’s a very trivial thing to start trou-
ble over,” Berman said. The M.T.A. ap-
parently reached the same conclusion.
The agency declined to comment on
the Etsy situation, but shortly afterward
it withdrew its legal demand. Berman
celebrated with a bottle of brandy.
“There’s nothing more New York-y than
this,” he said. “Everyone sends lots of
threats, stomps their feet, but in the end
we come to an agreement.”
—Raffi KhatchadourianLewis is a fly fisherman, and before long
he was standing in the bow, casting a
shrimplike pattern on a sinking line to
some weakfish that Crescitelli had es-
pied on his fish-finder. “I’ve never fished
for fish on a screen before,” Lewis said.
He looked trim in fishing pants, a blue
pullover, and black Allbirds. He kept his
balance in the chop.
“There are more weakfishing world
records within two miles of here than
anywhere in the world,” Crescitelli said.
“So let me get this straight—we got
a chance at a world record?” Lewis said.
Not today. The weakfishing was
weak, and Crescitelli gunned it out into
the bay. Sun rising, Verrazzano towers
gleaming. Crescitelli pulled up in a roil-
ing stretch of water, which, he explained,
was the outflow from a sewage-treat-
ment plant a mile away. “Smell that
sweet smell?” he said. “This is where
the bait’s at. Thing is, they changed the
formula. It’s not fishing as good as it
used to.”
“Fishing is never as good as it’s going
to be or as it was,” Lewis said.
“There,” Crescitelli said, pointing at
his screen. “That’s a shit ton of fish right
there.” Lewis cast and stripped, cast and
stripped: nothing. Crescitelli steered
north to Hoffmann Island, where sick
immigrants were quarantined a century
ago. “A guy made three porno movies
here in the seventies. Used to be build-
ings there.”
“Huh,” Lewis said, pitching his line
toward some old pilings: no dice.
“That’s good casting, Huey. Don’t be
so hard on yourself.”
To the south was another island, with
a smokestack and some ruins. “This was
the crematorium,” Crescitelli said. He
drifted the boat as close as he could, and
Lewis worked the eddy line off the jetty.
“Huey, you’re right in the spot. C’mon,
just one striper!”
Bang. Lewis’s rod tip bent. A striper?
No. A flounder. A flounder! On a fly?
“Never seen that, I gotta say,”
Crescitelli said.
“It’s better than not fishing,” Lewis
said.
He held up the flounder, grinning,
secure in the knowledge that a photo
of him with such a meagre specimen
would not in any way diminish his stand-
ing in the world.
—Nick Paumgarten
1
DAV I DANDGOLIATH DEPT.
MAPMAKER
J
ake Berman, a midtown lawyer, was
recently examining the M.T.A. sub-
way map on a wall of the West Fourth
Street station, when an elderly tourist
asked him how to get to Chelsea. Ber-
man began to relay precise directions;
then he stopped. “Funny story,” he said.
“I designed a subway map—a compet-
itor that the M.T.A. wants to get rid of.
So you’re asking the right dude.”
The funny story begins twelve years
ago. Berman, a transplant from San
Francisco, was at N.Y.U. Law School.
One weekend, he had a date in Brook-
lyn. After consulting the subway map,
he decided to take the B train from West
Fourth. “Here I am, waiting like an idiot
for half an hour, and there’s no B,” he
recalled. “They didn’t have countdown
clocks. They didn’t have cell-phone ser-
vice. The whole thing ends up being a
slightly dramatic fiasco.”
Berman gave up on the date; he later
learned that the B doesn’t run on week-
ends, a detail that he couldn’t find on the
map. He got so angry that he designed
his own map, spending hundreds of hours
on it and joining the ranks of New York’s
amateur transit cartographers. He has
since revised his map and designed some
for other cities, and even for science-fiction
epics. (He rendered all of “Star Wars” into
a diagram.) “Frustration is a great way to
become creative,” he said. Two years ago,
he discovered that, after he’d posted his
New York subway map on Wikipedia, in
2009, someone had begun selling it on
Etsy. He wrote in to complain. Then he
stole the idea. He listed the map himself,
at a starting price of fifty dollars.
Trying to explain the workings of a
megacity’s transit system with elegance
and accuracy is about as easy as describ-
ing the city itself. Some poetry is re-
quired. To create the first color-coded
subway map for New York, in 1967, tran-
sit officials brought in a former rocket
scientist, who devised four prototypes;
instead of choosing one of them, the offi-
cials mashed two together, resulting in