Putting His Stamp on Maps
Postal worker Michael Calcagno reimagines transportation designs with creative mapmaking mash-ups of Sacramento, San Francisco, New York City and beyond.
On any given weekday in Sacramento, you have a reasonably good chance of finding Michael Calcagno standing in a U.S. Postal Service truck making a map. The 54-year-old letter carrier, while on lunch breaks from his rounds in midtown and downtown, will retreat to the back of his “2-Ton” (as the ubiquitous boxy trucks are known), place his MacBook Air on one of the top shelves of the cargo area alongside the city’s packages, and practice his specialty: Mash-ups and updates of rail transit maps, with a particular emphasis on Sacramento Regional Transit’s light rail.
Mail carrier and transit mapmaker Michael Calcagno (Portrait by Andri Tambunan)
As a child in Queens, the New York City subway was the first system to capture Calcagno’s imagination. Flash forward to the present, and the subway map’s classic (and ever-evolving) knots of color and geometry have influenced Calcagno to redesign route maps—including Sacramento light rail—in the spirit of designs from multiple New York subway eras. In one map, the three light rail lines fork in narrow green, yellow and blue bands adapted from the iconic Massimo Vignelli subway map from 1972—a masterpiece that The New Yorker once described as “a nearly canonical piece of abstract graphic design.” In another, the light rail lines emulate the shape of the modern NYC subway map design (originally created in 1979 to replace Vignelli’s version). “I have always loved Vignelli’s design due to its simplicity, but I would admit it’s not perfect in some ways,” says Calcagno, who acknowledges the polarized reaction to the Vignelli design that favored linear efficiency over landmarks and scale.
But Vignelli’s influence is just one of many that has guided Calcagno’s work over the years. Indeed, the whole ethos of Calcagno Maps, a brand he launched in 2020, involves cross-breeding transit maps and insignia from around the world. In his collection of 10 Sacramento maps and counting, Calcagno draws from not only New York, but also adapts the wormy curves of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)’s system map, the classic dot-punctuated lines of Washington, D.C.’s Metro, and even the slim, sans-serif typography of the London Underground to Sacramento’s light rail stops and communities. For anyone who’s ever used such transit maps, Calcagno’s unique work prompts both nostalgia and wonder—the recognition of something and somewhere familiar, and the revelation of a new vision for getting there.
A Sacramento Regional Transit light rail map rendered in the style of Washington, D.C.’s classic Metro map. (Map by Michael Calcagno)
Calcagno, who was born Deaf, became fascinated with rail transit and maps as a child. He would ride in the front car of the NYC subway to stand at what is known as the “railfan window,” where he could see the oncoming tracks and stations. Within a few years after starting to ride alone at age 12, Calcagno had observed every track, station platform, and provision for future extensions or branches. His deafness curtailed his dream of becoming a train operator, but his fascination persisted, motivating young Michael to obtain subway maps to study and interpret the underlying design choices that helped people get from point A to point B. “For me, I wanted to explore more about the maps, who designed them, why they chose letters and numbers, the type of fonts they used, etc.”
Once Calcagno got his first computer in the early 1990s, he used the Microsoft Paint application to develop increasingly detailed subway maps. Soon he was uploading the maps to subway fan sites on the web.
After stops in Denver and Tampa, raising two boys and delivering mail along the way, Calcagno landed in Sacramento in 2008. By then he had largely put mapmaking on hold, only resuming in 2020 after his sons had left home and Calcagno felt the pull back to maps. “I began to work on finding myself again,” he says, “trying not to only work, but also to be happy and enjoy my hobbies again. In a way, returning to my creative passion has been very therapeutic.”
This Regional Transit light rail map was inspired by the London Underground map, including a play off the classic Underground logo. (Map by Michael Calcagno)
Calcagno’s initial cartographic comeback diagrammed Sacramento Regional Transit’s light rail system lines in clean, stark black and white. He advanced to a more thorough route map, with its terminals in Sacramento, Folsom and Elk Grove. He imposed Vignelli’s NYC-style aesthetic on the map, which drew accolades from fellow transit fans online. That was the moment when Calcagno decided to focus on recreating maps in the styles of others, later fusing Sacramento Regional Transit routes with the map designs of systems in the Bay Area, London and D.C. Aside from grabbing spare time for mapmaking during breaks on his mail route, Calcagno works largely from his couch for a few hours per week, occasionally referencing the voluminous collection of hundreds of transit maps and books that make up his home library.
As an enterprise, Calcagno Maps comprises a formal Etsy shop (where he sells map prints starting at $35) and an ad hoc array of posts to platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Reddit. There, rail transit enthusiasts and novices alike geek out over Calcagno’s latest creations. Not all are Sacramento-based, and not all are maps: There are mock-ups of new BART and Chicago Transit Authority logos inspired by the art deco Toronto Transit Commission shield, for instance. But his adopted hometown drives both the conversation and the inspiration: With four new Sacramento maps that he released in February and more concepts in the works, Calcagno’s creative, envelope-pushing combinations have no end in sight.
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