You can easily spend a day in New York City only interacting with public spaces named after male figures. (Did you know that Bleecker Street is named after the writer Anthony Bleecker?) And perhaps it’s the ease of that subtle, underlying assumption we carry with us as we move around the city that makes the “City of Women 2.0” map so effective in its simplicity.

This re-imagined subway map (originally created by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in 2016 and recently updated for 2019) is identical to the MTA’s current map, with one exception: every station is named after a notable woman with a New York connection.

Newly-added names include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cardi B, the All-Girl Robotics Team in the Bronx, and the poet Jacqueline Woodson.

Jelly-Schapiro, a geographer and writer, told Gothamist that he and Solnit were inclined to revisit the map and add more names to it because of how much has changed since 2016.

“You know, when we were [first] working on this it was the end of the Obama presidency,” Jelly-Schapiro said. “I think that these conversations were not nearly as prominent as they have become over the last few years, conversations around gender, around the history of slavery, the history of how and when monuments were erected.”

And while constructing this re-imagined map was a fun exercise, Jelly-Schapiro said it’s also pointing to something earnest.

"Names offer really powerful signals about what we value as a society, about the histories that we avow, about the histories that we want to push under the rug,” said Jelly Schapiro. “And I think it's an incredibly powerful and overdue conversation we're having now about who are the people that we celebrate in public space and how does that shape how we experience those places."

The writer Jia Tolentino is also among the newest additions to the map. (She’s the Franklin Avenue C stop in Bed-Stuy.) She told Gothamist that she’s had the 2016 “City of Women” map framed and mounted on her wall for years.

“I just thought this map is so beautiful,” said Tolentino, calling it an “alternate version of a city, a world we all have always lived in that hasn’t been recognized until much more recently.”

When asked what it feels like to be considered a living, breathing, notable woman of New York, Tolentino laughed.

“I can’t believe it. It’s like someone’s playing a practical joke.”

Tolentino said one of the reasons she was drawn to the map in the first place is that she has a hard time accepting that anything she does matters, in the grand scheme of things.

“And I think maybe the map was a reminder of maybe some part of that is socialization. Maybe some part of that is not just an existential modesty but an enforced one.”

Egyptian writer Mona Eltawahy lives in Harlem, but she was pleased to find out her name on a stop in Queens, among the Egyptian restaurants and cafes in Astoria.

“The best way for me to describe patriarchy, for men especially, is to ask them to imagine how a fish would respond if you asked a fish what water was,” said Eltahawy. She said she feels like she’s swimming every day, surrounded by boulevards and parks that bear the name of heroic (and sometimes not heroic) men.

“I think, for the majority of men, they only realize that when they see the names shifted,” Eltahway said.

“And for women, the opposite happens. Because we make our way through this patriarchy knowing exactly what it is and exactly the toll that it exacts upon us, and then to see our name finally on the places where we take the subway, where we live, we can finally point to them and say, ‘You see, this is what I’m talking about! We exist!’”

The first version of the City of Women map is on view at the New York Transit Museum through January 2020. The museum store is currently carrying prints of both maps for sale.

Listen to Shumita Basu talk about the map on WNYC:

Here's the full "City of Women 2.0" map, created by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and Rebecca Solnit; design by Lia Tjandra, cartography by Molly Roy (MTA route-lines and symbols, used by permission):

City Of Women map 2.0