Hertz is survived by his wife, Carole Ann (Ruden) Hertz, whom he married in 1954 two other sons, David and Joseph a daughter, Leslie B. He worked on transit maps for Houston and Washington, maps of New York City’s various neighborhoods, airport maps and directories, and more. He worked for the Walt Disney Company as art director for movie advertising for a decade before starting his own firm in the late 1960s. He grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Queens College in 1954, then spent two years in the Army. 1, 1932, in Brooklyn to Abraham and Jean (Gittleman) Hertz. It was fun to look at - the Museum of Modern Art in New York has that version in its collection - but few users loved it, in part because the Vignelli map didn’t relate the underground to the aboveground. There was already a system map (or “diagram,” as some preferred to call it), a colorful Modernist thing created by the Italian designer Massimo Vignelli and introduced in 1972. Hertz’s firm, Michael Hertz Associates, the task of coming up with a map of the New York City subway system that would help riders make sense of that many-tentacled beast. In the mid-1970s the Metropolitan Transportation Authority gave Mr. Hertz also lived in East Meadow, on Long Island.

His son Eugene announced the death, at Nassau University Medical Center, but did not give a cause. Michael Hertz, whose design firm produced one of the most consulted maps in human history, the curvy-lined chart that New York City subway riders peer at over one another’s shoulders to figure out which stop they want, died on Feb.

Nyc metro map