The standard MTA map only provides subway information for morning to evening weekday service, but the NYC transit system never sleeps (it just passes out sometimes in narcoleptic cataplexy). Now, to help late night straphangers stay informed on the underground after dark, the MTA has produced a late night subway map, the first of its kind. During the overnight, three subway lines don’t run, three lines become shuttle trains, six express trains run as locals, and a magical night-only shuttle appears, with flappers dancing the Charleston and uncorking magnums of Champagne. You can behold the whole thing in its dark and moody glory here in pdf form. The MTA explains the virtues of the night map thus:
The map has a gray background color to prevent confusion with the normal subway map. The New York City Subway is the only large subway or metro system in the world to maintain service to all its stations around the clock. The overnight service shown in the night map runs generally from midnight to 6 a.m., although certain lines’ overnight service patterns depicted in the map may begin or end slightly earlier or later than these times. The MTA has printed 25,000 copies of the map in tandem with its normal press run of a million copies of the standard subway and railroad map.
For the MTA subway map completist, 300 "pristine," unfolded press sheets of the night map are available for purchase at the Transit Museum Annex for $20 each. (Free copies can be obtained at the New York Transit Museum, at Boerum Place & Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn, and at the Transit Museum Annex in Grand Central Terminal.) As an added bonus, the reverse side of the map shows a work commissioned for MTA Arts for Transit called "City of Glass." Created by Romare Bearden, the work was installed in the Westchester Square station in the Bronx in 1993.
(Courtesy MTA)
