A New York City subway map based on Michael Hertz Associates’ 1979 design. Image by Getty/Chris Hondros/Staff

By PJ Grisar February 27, 2020

Michael Hertz, the graphic designer who helped make the New York City subway system legible for over 4 million riders a day, has passed away. He was 87.

Hertz’s son Eugene confirmed his death, telling CNN he died of natural causes on February 18, at Nassau University Medical Center.

In 1979, Hertz’s firm, Michael Hertz Associates, debuted a new map for the New York City subway. The map replaced Italian artist Massimo Vignelli’s abstract design from 1972, which was seen to have sacrificed accuracy for aesthetics, and prompted a flood of complaints from straphangers.

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“Although a strikingly handsome design, Vignelli’s map was criticized by riders for its inability to assist you in knowing how the underground world of the subway related to the above-ground geography,” Hertz told Gothamist in 2007.

Hertz and his team’s answer was to orient the map around recognizable landmarks like Central Park and evoke the real geography and neighborhoods of the five boroughs. Transit maps were a big part of his firm’s business; Hertz and his team developed them for Houston and Washington, DC prior to the New York project, for which he acknowledged he had to “nip and tuck” certain areas of the city, magnifying the most congested train routes to make the different lines more easily readable for commuters and tourists alike.

Born August 1, 1932 to Abraham and Jean Hertz, Hertz was raised in Brooklyn and Queens and earned a BFA at Queens College. Before pursuing his career in design he spent two years in the army, after which he worked for the Walt Disney Company as an art director before founding Michael Hertz Associates in the 1960s, The New York Times reported.

While Hertz’s firm’s design has undergone revisions since 1979, including by Hertz himself in 1998, his template remains in place. “In transit map circles, Mike was a giant,” Chuck Gordanier, the chief of marketing and advertising for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, told The Times. “All New Yorkers carry some image of Mike’s subway map in their heads.”

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com

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