Hagstrom Map is the best-selling brand of maps in the New York City metropolitan area. It was formerly part of the Langenscheidt publishing group,[1] who sold its map division to Universal Map, an affiliate of Kappa Publishing Group, in 2010.
The company began in 1916[2] when Andrew Hagstrom, a Swedish immigrant produced a map to help customers locate his newly opened drafting business in lower Manhattan. The map was popular enough to go on sale, and Hagstrom soon extended it to include all of Manhattan. Later he developed maps of New York City's other boroughs and then the extended New York City region, eventually offering over 100 maps. During the 1970s and 1980s, Hagstrom's catalog included maps of a number of cities beyond the New York area, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia, though most of these publications were out of print by the 1990s.[1]
The company's lineup includes atlases, borough maps, maps of the Tri-State Region and detailed and quite colorful maps of midtown Manhattan. The midtown maps, which detail most of the significant buildings and businesses (Rockefeller Center, Pennsylvania Station, Saks Fifth Avenue, etc.) show the changing face of the city's business district, and have started to draw the attention of map collectors.
The New York City Subway used a Hagstrom design for its official subway maps during the 1940s.
Hagstrom was knighted by the King of Sweden for his success in America.
For many years, a code was used to internally identify the publication date for Hagstrom pocket maps. The practice ceased in 1978. The code is as follows:
H A G S T R O M C X 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Usually appearing in the lower right hand corner of a map are letters: e.g. G-SR To decipher refer to the chart to locate the letters and corresponding numbers below each letter. In this instance G is 3 and SR is 46. The date is March 1946. The first letter or letters in the code refer to the month, the next two letters refer to the year.