Talk:John Tauranac

Conflict

When I came to add information to this page in March 2015, I found the following note in the Talk page under "Conflict": "This website (www.ursasoft.com/maps/who-is-who.htm) states that Tauranac was not actually the person who designed the 1979 map. I know next to nothing about this - maybe someone else can clear this up. (User:Cantara, 10 March 2006)". The cited web site was actually my own, and I was surprised to see it being used as evidence against John Tauranac.

This can be explained as follows. Around 2001 I started a web site that catalogued published maps of the New York City Subway, based on my growing personal collection of maps. In this catalogue I labelled the 1979 MTA map as having been designed by John Tauranac. This was based on secondary information passed on to me by other map collectors. Around 2004 I received an email from Michael Hertz, who claimed that he alone had designed the map and that Tauranac was only an administrator who had no involvement in the design process. He gave me the contact details of Dr Arline Bronzaft, whom I spoke to, and he sent me a number of letters from individuals who asserted that Hertz had designed the map. Accordingly I changed my web site to say that Hertz was the designer, and Tauranac's role was unknown. This must have been the web site that Cantara accessed. Hertz then sent me a legal affidavit that he was proposing to use in a legal action against Tauranac. I was astonished to find in this affidavit a print-out of my own web site, being used as evidence that Hertz alone had designed the map. This seemed to me to be circular reasoning since the basis of my online statement that Hertz was the designer was just Hertz's own statement plus the other documents that constituted the rest of the affidavit. In response to this, I took down that web page until I could get a better understanding of the origins of the 1979 map.

Over the following years I was able to make a number of visits to the US, during which I searched the Transit Museum Archives and tracked down as many of the surviving members of the Subway Map Committee as I could. I found a more complex picture, in which both Tauranac and Hertz had played their respective roles, Tauranac as Chairman of the Subway Map Committee that determined the design of the map, and Hertz as the principal of Michael Hertz Associates, which carried out the graphic design and produced the mechanical for the finished map.

I have written up my research in book form, but so far could find a publisher only for the volume on Vignelli's map ("Vignelli: Transit Maps", RIT Press, 2012). This year, I am arranging funding for the self-publication of three volumes, including the one dealing with the Subway Map Committee, which will lay out in detail how the 1979 map came about and the documentary evidence for this.

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